No polarization–Expected Values of Climate Change Impacts among European Forest Professionals and Scientists

Abstract

The role of values in climate-related decision-making is a prominent theme of climate communication research. The present study examines whether forest professionals are more driven by values than scientists are, and if this results in value polarization. A questionnaire was designed to elicit and assess the values assigned to expected effects of climate change by forest professionals and scientists working on forests and climate change in Europe. The countries involved covered a north-to-south and west-to-east gradient across Europe, representing a wide range of bio-climatic conditions and a mix of economic–social–political structures. We show that European forest professionals and scientists do not exhibit polarized expectations about the values of specific impacts of climate change on forests in their countries. In fact, few differences between forest professionals and scientists were found. However, there are interesting differences in the expected values of forest professionals with regard to climate change impacts across European countries. In Northern European countries, the aggregated values of the expected effects are more neutral than they are in Southern Europe, where they are more negative. Expectations about impacts on timber production, economic returns, and regulatory ecosystem services are mostly negative, while expectations about biodiversity and energy production are mostly positive.

To Mitigate or Adapt? Explaining Why Citizens Responding to Climate Change Favour the Former

“…Since many, if not most, of the climate change impacts that are expected to emerge, will do so in future decades and even centuries, these findings are important. It should be noted that in line with [18], the present study was only concerned with intentional adaptation and mitigation and that there might be unintentional causal interaction between adaptation and mitigation behaviours which the respondents did not take into account (but which, for instance, societal institutions are well aware of [8]). With this qualification in mind, was it to be expected that citizens of Malmö would favour decision-making promoting global (rather than local) and temporally distant (rather than more immediate) benefits?…”

“…The fraction of mitigation or adaptation decisions observed was used as the rule for determining if the probability estimate is great enough to be classified into the positive category (see [3]). The variable net value of expected impacts (homogeneity of expected climate change values in [18]) was used in both of the univariate models…”

“…The values used to convert valuations expressed in words to numbers were chosen to reflect the number of alternative pre-defined answers to each question (Table 1). As described by Persson et al [18], the net value of expected impacts was, therefore, a measure of how strongly climate change was expected to have determinately negative or positive impacts on all 23 objects. In this study, the net value of expected impacts ranged from −92 to +92.…”

Climate Change and Informal Education in the Opinion of Forest Users in Poland

“…Public understanding of the scale and scope of climate change as well as the resulting environmental consequences is key to reducing consumption, changing behavior, and developing appropriate environmental attitudes [35][36][37][38]. It is also an important element to improve communication [36], whose task is to engage in dialogue with societies and decision-makers in order to implement real actions to curb climate change. According to Willamson et al [37], social factors influence individual assessment of perceptions of environmental issues, which was also confirmed in our study.…”

A comparative assessment of forest/green cover and the awareness of forestry district managers

“…The forest service decision-makers may have different perceptions on climate change adaptation around the globe. Persson et al (2020) studied whether forest experts are more values-led than scientists regarding speci c climate change effects on forests in their countries and whether this leads to value polarization. They found that European forest experts and scientists do not have divided values but few gaps between them.…”