| In the United States, public discourse about adaptation to anthropogenic climate change began more recently than debates on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and thus far has been more muted. It has been unclear whether public opinion has the potential to become as sharply polarized on adaptation responses as it has been on mitigation policies. To examine this question, I surveyed a representative sample of residents of a coastal county in Maryland (n=378; response rate = 4%), and tested the impact of a community deliberative event (n=40; participation rate = 11%) that presented sea-level rise information within small-group discussions as a potential strategy to reduce polarization. I found that the same preferences for societal "ways of life," such as degree of individualism and hierarchy, that have contributed to politically polarized beliefs about climate change are also associated with people's perceptions of local sea-level rise risk. These preferences are predictive of perceptions of sea-level rise risk to the county--the level at which local governmental policy responses will be decided---whereas living near coastal flooding and inundation hazards is not. Coastal proximity is a significant predictor of sea-level rise risk perceptions, but only for people's own homes and neighborhoods. The community deliberative event---a daylong process of expert presentations, access to property-level risk data, and small-group discussions---significantly increased topic knowledge among participants (t(35)= -3.51, p < .001, one-tailed), and significantly increased problem identification (t(7)= 2.38, p= 0.025 one-tailed) and issue concern ( t(7)= -2.75, p= 0.014 one-tailed) among those participants with a worldview predisposing them to lower risk perceptions. These findings suggest that individuals may construe risk information through the lens of any number of group identities that they hold, including as a member of their local community, and provides grounds for a possible theoretical reinterpretation of the stability versus mobility hypotheses of cultural worldviews. With respect to sea-level rise, this implies that policy discussions that emphasize local community identity as a component of public engagement and decision-making may be more effective in bypassing cultural polarization in problem recognition, than either larger-scale issue debates or those which neglect the role of social context. |
