Heat exposure and the climate change beliefs in a Desert City: The case of Phoenix metropolitan area

Highlights

• Cities in the USA have experienced a number of extreme heat events affecting locals' climate change perceptions.

• We conducted fixed effects in two-level logistic regression models with a random intercept at city level to test hypotheses related to socio-demographics; heat exposure; and political beliefs in the Phoenix Metro Area.

• There are significant relationships between climate change beliefs and race, education, heat-related illnesses, and liberal beliefs.

• We recommend the results to be considered in the design of effective just adaptation strategies among key agents from the governments and civil society organizations.

Abstract

Beliefs in climate change are influenced by personal experiences and sociodemographic characteristics; yet justice considerations are often overlooked. We unveil the influence of these factors' on climate change beliefs in a large American city facing substantial climate change impacts, Phoenix, Arizona. Using the Phoenix Area Social Survey that includes data collected from (n = 806) households across fourteen cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, we investigate what factors influence a belief that “global warming and climate change are already occurring.” Engaging adaptive capacity and justice literatures with climate belief models, we find that belief in climate change and global warming is positively associated with race specifically other than non-Hispanic Whites, high levels of education, personal experience with heat-related illnesses, and liberal beliefs. Widespread agreement about climate change is found within the scientific community, but general populations, especially in the USA, lag behind in accepting climate change. Critically, there are important justice dimensions absent in the existing literature relevant to understanding belief in and the impacts of climate change. Unpacking these factors could help inform policy makers and civil society organizations in their efforts to design more “just adaptation” strategies.

Introduction

More than 70% of the world's population will live in cities by 2050 (UN, 2014), and climate change related events, such as heat and droughts, have huge impacts on the socio-ecological and technical systems in cities including increased risks of mortality (Klinenberg, 1999; Gasparrini et al., 2017). The IPCC Report (Stocker et al., 2012) shows that the effect of climate change coupled with urbanization increases heat exposure per capita. Critically, the impacts of heatwaves are not equally distributed among people living in urban areas, with some populations and communities more exposed and more vulnerable to climate change impacts or with less capacity to adapt (Balbus and Malina, 2009; Costello et al., 2009; Friel et al., 2011; Zografos et al., 2016). Climate change related weather events disproportionately affect the urban poor and aggravate socio-economic inequalities and environmental injustices in the cities of the US (Harlan et al., 2006; McCarthy et al., 2010; Hartz et al., 2013; Harlan et al., 2014).

Cities in the US have experienced severe weather events triggered by climate change for decades (Curriero et al., 2002; Madrigano et al., 2018; Hayden et al., 2011). Leiserowitz (2005) finds that most Americans continue to see climate change as a moderate risk and a future threat that will impact people and places that are geographically and temporally distant. Because of a lack of political will and intransigence of existing institutions and systems, the capacity for local adaptation has been questioned (Adger, 2006; O'Brien et al., 2007; Cutter and Finch, 2008; Krellenberg et al., 2017; Kuokkanen and Yazar, 2018; Yazar et al., 2020b). Some climate measures and actions perpetuate structures and systems that increase vulnerability, cause maladaptation, and increase climate injustices (Barnett and O'Neill, 2010; Kates et al., 2012; Hughes, 2013; Shi et al., 2016; Yazar et al., 2020a). There are feedbacks between local communities' capacity to adapt, proposed climate actions, and individual awareness and perceptions of climate change (Moser and Ekstrom, 2010).

Climate belief modelling often reveals a “white-male effect” (Albright and Crow, 2019; McCright and Dunlap, 2011; Kahan et al., 2007; Satterfield et al., 2004), providing some evidence of the racialized and gendered aspects of climate change beliefs. Yet, the modelling literature often does not engage with justice considerations. Building on a rich literature of environmental behaviour, we explore the role of race, ethnicity, gender, parenthood, and education (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002; Cottrell, 2003; Scannell and Gifford, 2010), while integrating perspectives of environmental justice and political ecology, such as socio-environmental conditions' uneven distribution across temporal and spatial scales (Cutter, 1995; Escobar, 1998; Heynen et al., 2006; Cole and Foster, 2001). The majority of climate change analyses and beliefs models are based on flood-related events (Spence et al., 2011; Walker and Burningham, 2011; Ogunbode et al., 2017; Albright and Crow, 2019) and we argue that our study makes an important contribution by using personal exposure data to analyse the effects of extreme heat on individuals' perceptions of climate change and global warming. To analyse the factors influencing climate change beliefs, we use the 2011 Phoenix Area Social Survey (n = 806) part of the Central Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) (Harlan et al., 2017). We propose an integrated model of climate beliefs and justice which is essential to understanding climate adaptation in the context of one of the most climate change impacted cities in the USA, Phoenix, Arizona.