Welcome back to my blog!
I conducted a survey two weeks ago to find out the general perception of climate change-related risks amongst Singaporeans. I asked my respondents if they felt that Singapore was safe from natural hazards. The general impression was divided equally down the middle, with 30 surveyees responding that “Singapore could come under threat in the next 80 years” while the other 23 respondents indicated that they felt “Singapore is safe for the next 80 years”. This piqued my interest as to why they felt that way and inspired me to get some insights into how people view climate change and why.
While people generally understand how the impacts of climate change will affect them, they remain ambivalent about the issue. After doing some research, I found out that people tend to give more weight to recent events but view climate change as a distant concept. Weber (2006) mentioned that “initial impressions are continuously updated in a way that gives recent events more weight than distant events”. Events like war, terrorism, economic recession, epidemics can have more significant impacts on people because the implications are imaginable in the short term. In the same vein, personal exposures to the effects of climate change can also play a role in making people view it with more weight. In a study by Whitmarsh (2008), he found out that “those affected by air pollution are more likely to take environmentally-relevant actions specifically out of concern for climate change”. He also compared flood victims to unaffected individuals to find out if it affects their perception of climate change. This time, however, Whitmarsh found that being affected by floods didn’t increase an individual’s view towards climate change. He also cited that once a flood defence scheme was implemented, flood victims would no longer view floods as a risk.
Specifically among Singaporeans, climate change is often seen as an intangible concept. Despite rising sea levels and severe droughts manifesting as we speak, the majority of Singaporeans are still sceptical towards climate change. Interestingly, a majority of the younger generation (12-24 years old) in my survey answered: “Yes, safe for at least the next 80 years.” with many of them explaining that “It has never occurred to [them] that Singapore would experience natural hazards.” (Only two BES students were asked to do this survey because I wanted a more reliable study amongst typical youths in Singapore and if I were to ask my BES classmates, the data would be skewed.) On the other hand, those above 25 years old indicated that they don’t feel safe and that Singapore could come under threat because of climate change. After doing some research, I still couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for this result. It could likely be because they are less naïve and optimistic about Singapore’s future as compared to youths.
I hope that my sharing was useful in shedding light on why people around us still seem so nonchalant about our climate crisis.
Thank you for reading. 🙂
References:
- Weber (2006). Experience-based and description-based perceptions of long-term risk: Why global warming does not scare us (yet). Climatic Change, 77, 103–120. doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9060-3
- Whitmarsh (2008) Are flood victims more concerned about climate change than other people? The role of direct experience in risk perception and behavioural response, Journal of Risk Research, 11:3, 351-374, doi: 10.1080/13669870701552235
- [Image]. Retrieved from: datsuncarsandparts.com/data/archive/img/132660664.png
Hi Letitia,
I really like the second paragraph as it gives me a better idea about environmental psychology. It is interesting to see how people are worried about “obvious” events and catastrophes but not about climate change when the effects of climate change are so glaring.
With regard to the issue of age may play a part in perceptions toward climate change, I agree that youths could be more naive about the issue as they may not be so well-informed about the matter. However, I feel that youths, as naive as they seem, play a greater role in combating climate change. This article (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-change-their-parents-minds-about-climate-change/) talks about how the younger generation are instead “educating” their parents on climate change due to the very fact that they are naive – which in the article is mentioned by how childrens’ “views on the issue do not generally reflect any entrenched political ideology”. This is really cool and it made me think. The article further establishes the effectiveness of childrens as climate change educators based on how parents are more receptive to their kids’ ideas and thoughts. I feel like sometimes in this cold dark world, what we need is the very optimism and “naivety” in children, to fuel hope and passion for change. What do you think?
Cheers,
Song Thye
Hi Song Thye,
Thanks for reading!
I do agree with you that this optimism and “naivety” of children can go a long way to help educate their parents about climate change, particularly in political landscapes where such issues are often divided along party lines (i.e. In USA). However, I feel that this may be impaired in Singapore as our Confucian culture teaches us that elders are the head of the family and of course, always right. As a result, certain children like myself are often unable to seriously influence the mindsets of our parents towards climate change.
Furthermore, in my opinion, many Singaporean youths out there remains ambivalent about climate change because they don’t see how it affects them yet. It could be because we have a high level of trust in our government, so we trust that they will prepare us against the impacts of climate change.
It could also be a lack of environmental education as a result of our education system. Furthermore, teachers are found to be one of the groups with the lowest environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviours. This view was further reinforced in a recent conversation I had with a secondary school teacher from my church. She was surprised to find out that we could purchase drinks with our tumblers and many other actions to reduce our footprint. That moment made me realise that school teachers, who are the very key people who shape students’ opinions, truly needs to be on board with the environmental problems we have, before children can formulate pro-environmental attitudes.
Cheers,
Letitia
Hi Letitia & SOng Thye,
You may be interested to know that one of my honours students studied the link between kiasuism and pro-environmental behaviours among youth. In carrying out her research, she held focus groups and discovered that youths tend to perceive environmental problems (including climate change) as issues that affect ppl elsewhere and in future, i.e., don’t touch their lives.
We were quite surprised by that result.
jc