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ABSTRACT
This study explores climate change related risk perception among residents of the 'Big Island' of Hawaii, an environmentally vulnerable region. Adapting established instruments, we investigated potential links among socio-demographic variables, risk perception, and perceived preparedness and knowledge, as they relate to climate change. Results reveal relationships between risk perceptions for climate change and gender, with females significantly more aware of the risks posed by climate change, but less prepared than men. Additionally, indigenous and native respondents felt that climate change events posed more risk and felt less prepared compared to non-indigenous. Results suggest that an understanding of how risk perceptions vary by gender, knowledge, and other lesserexplored demographic factors may enable decision makers to plan and implement more effective mitigation and adaptation measures in the region.
Keywords: Climate change, vulnerability, risk perception, adaptation preparedness, island nations
INTRODUCTION
Climate change will have numerous impacts on the physical environment and on human society. Adapting to climate change will require responding to the physical effects of global warming and adjusting how we conceptualize, measure, and manage risks. Climate change is creating new risks and it is also impacting the interdependencies among those risks, highlighting the need for research and planning that seeks to understand risks from both the environmental and social arenas (Kousky and Cooke 2009). Risk perceptions are believed to interact with underlying values to form subjective and variable limits that hinder a society's ability to act (Adger et al. 2009). Since the reaction to potential climate change rests on moral, ethical, and value judgments, it is important to recognize that different degrees of knowledge, cultural preferences, responsibility and trust, shape individual positions and perceptions (Poortinga et al. 2006). This requires an understanding of which factors contribute to individual and collective risk perceptions of climate change, and how those perceptions are formulated (Leiserowitz 2005; O'Conner et al. 1999; Sjöberg 2003).
Climate change is a phenomenon that is not well understood by the general public. Past research in regions that have experienced obvious physical evidence of climate change indicates that personal exposure significantly increases concern and willingness to take action (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment 2004; Frondel, Simora, and Sommer 2017; Leiserowitz and Broad 2008). However, climate change occurs at various scales; even when individuals experience the...