Risks

• Risk refers to a situation, event, or activity which may lead to uncertain adverse outcomes affecting something that humans value

• 2 components:

  • Severity

  • Uncertainty of the adverse outcome

Environmental Risks

• Risks for the environment (e.g. acidification of oceans caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide)

• Risks from the environment (e.g., destruction of human habitat due to flooding

• Environmental risks often emerge from the aggregated behaviors of many individuals (e.g. use of fossil fuels) rather than from a single activity

  • Examples of Fossil Fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, kerosene, propane

• Mitigation requires behavior change of many people

• The consequences of environmental hazards are often temporally delayed and geographically distant

• The people who contribute to a risk (e.g. industrial countries) are not necessarily the ones who suffer the consequences (e.g. developing countries, future generations

Subjective Risk Judgements

• Risk perception refers to people’s subjective judgment about the risk that is associated with some activity, event, or technology.

• Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

  • Strongest beta = risk perception and pro-environmental behavior

  • How we see risks influences our pro-environmental behavior

• Public Perception of Climate Change and Disaster Preparedness: Evidence from the Philippines

  • Large population with low knowledge of climate change and the risk of climate change

  • Little population have high knowledge of climate change and the risk of climate change

• Heuristics and Biases in Risk Judgments:

  • Availability Heuristic

    • People often rely on the “ease” with which relevant instances of an event can be retrieved from memory (e.g., seeing the threats and consequences of environmental problems can increase risk judgments)

    • More risky if they learn about it

    • Media’s role is a huge influence on our knowledge and risk judgement on climate change

  • Affect Heuristic

    • If individuals feel positive about an activity, they tend to judge the risk as low and the benefit as high

    • If they feel negative about an activity, they tend to judge the risk as high and the benefit as low

  • Temporal Discounting

    • Refers to the psychological phenomenon that outcomes in the far future are subjectively less significant than immediate outcomes

    • Less likely to engage in pro-environmental behavior because you only think about the immediate outcome rather than the outcomes in the far future

Risks, Values, and Morality

• Deontological Principle

  • Focus is on the inherent rightness or wrongness of the act per se

• Consequentialist Principle

  • Focus on the magnitude and likelihood of consequences

Emotional Reactions to Environmental Risks

• People in general react emotionally to disasters if they see that the disasters are caused by human actions rather than natural disasters.

• Emotions = strong drivers of behaviors

Environmental Stress

• Factors in the environment that causes us stress

• Environmental Stressor

  • (e.g. noise, crowding, pollution)

  • Can be acute (e.g. Pollution levels when stuck in a tunnel)

  • Can be chronic (e.g. living nearby a trafficked highway)

• Noise

  • Increases stress hormones

  • Lower levels of well-being

  • Extraversion is more tolerant to city noise

• Crowding

  • One may lose personal space

  • associated with social withdrawal

  • Associated with stress hormone levels for adults

• Poor Housing Quality

  • Children, adolescents, and adults displayed higher levels of stress hormones

• Traffic Congestion

  • May lead to elevated physiological stress and negative affect

  • More negative social interactions with their family members at home