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Contextualizing cross-national patterns in household climate change adaptation

Nature Climate Change volume 12, pages 30–35 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding social and behavioural drivers and constraints of household adaptation is essential to effectively address increasing climate-induced risks. Factors shaping household adaptation are commonly treated as universal, despite an emerging understanding that adaptations are shaped by social, institutional and cultural contexts. Using original surveys in the United States, China, Indonesia and the Netherlands (N = 3,789), we explore variations in factors shaping households’ adaptations to flooding, the costliest hazard worldwide. We find that social influence, worry, climate change beliefs, self-efficacy and perceived costs exhibit universal effects on household adaptations, despite countries’ differences. Disparities occur in the effects of response efficacy, flood experience, beliefs in governmental actions, demographics and media, which we attribute to specific cultural or institutional characteristics. Climate adaptation policies can leverage the revealed similarities when extrapolating best practices across countries yet should exercise caution, as context-specific socio-behavioural drivers may discourage or even reverse household adaptation motivation.

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Fig. 1: Social and behavioural factors motivating household climate change adaptation in four countries.
Fig. 2: Effect distributions for factors influencing households’ intentions to adapt to flooding.
Fig. 3: Percentage of households that have undertaken adaptation measures.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. The authors are working to deposit the data used in this analysis in an online repository by 2023. When this occurs, an announcement will be made on http://www.sc3.center/.

Code availability

The code used to analyse the data will be made available at http://www.sc3.center/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant agreement no. 758014). We thank YouGov, specifically P. Newbold and G. Ellison, for their support with survey administration. We also thank D. Osberghaus and P. Bubeck for their feedback on the initial version of the questionnaire.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

    Brayton Noll, Tatiana Filatova & Alessandro Taberna

  2. Faculty of Behavioral, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

    Ariana Need

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  1. Brayton Noll
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  2. Tatiana Filatova
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Contributions

T.F. designed and directs the research project. B.N. and T.F. conceived of the empirical research design and wrote the survey with input from A.N. and A.T. B.N. analysed the data with guidance from T.F. and A.N. All authors discussed the results and contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Brayton Noll or Tatiana Filatova.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Robyn Wilson, Christian Kuhlicke and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Noll, B., Filatova, T., Need, A. et al. Contextualizing cross-national patterns in household climate change adaptation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 30–35 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01222-3

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