[MCN] Forest Owners' Response to Climate Change

[Lance Olsen]

PLOSONE Published: May 25, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155137

Forest Owners' Response to Climate Change: University Education 
Trumps Value Profile
		Kristina Blennow, 
		Johannes Persson, 
		Erik Persson, 
		Marc Hanewinkel

Abstract
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0155137

Do forest owners' levels of education or value profiles explain their 
responses to climate change? The cultural cognition thesis (CCT) has 
cast serious doubt on the familiar and often criticized "knowledge 
deficit" model, which says that laypeople are less concerned about 
climate change because they lack scientific knowledge. Advocates of 
CCT maintain that citizens with the highest degrees of scientific 
literacy and numeracy are not the most concerned about climate 
change. Rather, this is the group in which cultural polarization is 
greatest, and thus individuals with more limited scientific literacy 
and numeracy are more concerned about climate change under certain 
circumstances than those with higher scientific literacy and 
numeracy. The CCT predicts that cultural and other values will trump 
the positive effects of education on some forest owners' attitudes to 
climate change. Here, using survey data collected in 2010 from 766 
private forest owners in Sweden and Germany, we provide the first 
evidence that perceptions of climate change risk are uncorrelated 
with, or sometimes positively correlated with, education level and 
can be explained without reference to cultural or other values. We 
conclude that the recent claim that advanced scientific literacy and 
numeracy polarizes perceptions of climate change risk is unsupported 
by the forest owner data. In neither of the two countries was 
university education found to reduce the perception of risk from 
climate change. Indeed in most cases university education increased 
the perception of risk. Even more importantly, the effect of 
university education was not dependent on the individuals' value 
profile.

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"Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and 
irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across 
critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global 
ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a 
planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence."

Barnovsky et al. Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere. 
Nature.  07 June 2012
doi:10.1038/nature11018




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