| 英文摘要: | Climate change awareness, risk perception and policy support vary between and within countries. National-scale comparisons can help to explain this variability and be used to develop targeted interventions. Although scientific understanding of the biophysical impacts of climate change has increased, along with degrees of certainty, there is still widespread variability in public awareness, understanding and risk perceptions within and between countries. The failure of global climate negotiations to achieve a robust international agreement is largely due to the divergence of the ambitions of different countries1. Certainty that climate change is occurring is strongly associated with support for policy action2. As such, raising levels of climate change understanding and risk perception could result in increased acceptance of climate policy across nations and aid progress towards a post-Kyoto agreement. With over 20 years of research, the complex array of factors contributing to social perceptions of climate change have been relatively well articulated, drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives. But the ability to conduct national comparisons has been limited by the lack of comparative datasets. As a result, the vast majority of empirical focus has been geographically centred on Europe and North America with little understanding of other geographical settings, including the Global South. In Nature Climate Change, Tien Ming Lee and colleagues3 provide the first global assessment — representing over 90% of the world's population — of factors that contribute to national climate change awareness and risk perceptions, and examine cross-national explanatory factors.
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Affiliations
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Debbie Hopkins is at the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand
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