ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0834-1622
Current Organisation
University of Tasmania
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-04-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2022
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2022
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-08-2020
DOI: 10.1002/WCC.676
Abstract: As losses from extreme weather events grow, many governments are looking to privatize the financing and incentivization of climate adaptation through insurance markets. In a pure market approach to insurance for extreme weather events, in iduals become responsible for ensuring they are adequately covered for risks to their own properties, and governments no longer contribute funds to post‐disaster recovery. Theoretically, insurance premiums signal the level of risk faced by each household, and incentivize homeowners to invest in adaptive action, such as retrofitting, or drainage work, to reduce premiums. Where risk is considered too high by insurance markets, housing is devalued, in theory leading to retreat from risky areas. In this review article, we evaluate the suitability of private insurance as a mechanism for climate adaptation at a household and community level. We find a mismatch between social understandings of responsibility for climate risks, and the technocratic, market‐based home insurance products offered by private insurance markets. We suggest that by constructing increasingly in idualized, technical, and calculative evaluations of risk, market‐based models of insurance for extreme weather events erode the solidaristic and collective discourses and practices that support adaptive behavior. This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change Institutions for Adaptation
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-11-2022
Abstract: Communication about climate change has never been more urgent. But what if talking about a need for concern about climate change actually contributes to resistance against such concern? I argue that in an effort to stimulate concern and action, climate communicators often fail to listen and give respect to the values and experiences of publics who are unconcerned about climate change. Climate change narratives tend to pathologise unconcern as a negative and uniform attitude, without reflecting critically on the sources of these narratives beyond scientific facts. In shaping normative and unreflexive narratives of concern and failing to address the actual concerns and priorities of erse publics, communicators can effectively co‐produce counter‐narratives. In response, in this article I share the stories of people who identify as unconcerned about climate change. Their narratives reveal processes of discursive friction between the concerned and the unconcerned, through which values, priorities, and assumptions are brought into conflict. Recognising and representing the messiness and plurality of attitudes to climate change could generate more useful forms of friction, shifting from antagonistic to agonistic and productive discourse. Avoiding polarised narratives of climate concern and unconcern is vital to enable a broader participation in erse coalitions for climate action.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-10-2015
DOI: 10.1002/WCC.320
Abstract: Empirical and theoretical research on trust has received little attention in climate change literature despite the central role of trust in determining responses to climate science. We reassess the challenge of climate change communication in light of recent research on trust across social, psychological, and neuroscientific disciplines. We argue that networks of explicit and implicit trust in everyday practices are a foundation of stable society. Climate change research demands that we re‐evaluate our trust in many elements of our everyday lives in a way that is profoundly unsettling. The threat posed to networks of trust by climate science has contributed to political polarization of the issue. Such adversarial debate has its source not in competing biophysical claims, but in different networks of trust in existing socio‐technical systems. We argue that a more nuanced understanding of the psychological and social foundations of trust offers opportunities for messengers of climate change to connect with alienated publics. We conclude that the challenge of climate change communication is not primarily to engender trust in scientific claims, but to re‐align the networks of trust that make everyday life possible. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:79–91. doi: 10.1002/wcc.320 This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change Communication Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 24-06-2022
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-05-2018
Abstract: Polarization in environmental conflicts obstructs decision making at all scales. The Australian state of Tasmania has a history of intense polarization around environmental issues. This article uses a social study of citizens of the capital, Hobart, and a case study of a recent attempt to disrupt polarization about forestry in Tasmania, to develop a novel conceptualization of ‘ruts’ in environmental conflicts. Ruts are formed when polarizing social constructs gain a momentum that perpetuates entrenched discourse coalitions and storylines into subsequent issues. This is evidenced in attitudinal survey results, and in interviews that show how storylines from the forestry debate frame people’s responses to climate change. The case study describes negotiations in the forestry conflict that had some success in disrupting these polarized discourses. After the long-term failure of the traditional authorities of government and science to resolve conflict over Tasmania’s forests, a sub-political process emerged to directly renegotiate a shared definition of risk. The study shows that new coalitions of players from outside traditional systems of authority have the potential to disrupt polarized discourses, through the creation of shared storylines. The challenge is to be prepared to acknowledge the legitimacy of ergent values, and to seek framings that sidestep, rather than confront strongly held conflicting values. Insights from this article are likely to be of value for other environmental conflicts, including climate change.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-07-2023
DOI: 10.1002/WCC.853
Abstract: Discourses about young people are interacting with climate change discourses in ways that often marginalize the young in social responses to climate change. The resulting stories about young people in a changing climate build upon long‐standing representations of youthhood in late modern societies as a liminal, ill‐defined state between childhood and adulthood. The social and behavioral sciences have both helped produce these stories and critically examined their origins, characteristics, and effects. This article offers a novel critical review of ideas about young people in climate change research across a wide variety of disciplines and fields, including geography, psychology, sociology, education, political studies, health studies, media studies, legal studies, and youth studies. We employ Hajer's account of discursive storylines to identify seven ways in which young people are storied in climate discourses. While distinct, stories of young people as innocent , vulnerable , heroic , alarmist , inheriting , apathetic or narcissistic overlap, and interact. This variety of storylines reflects the mutable category of young people and the deliberate ambiguity with which it is often deployed. We use this typology in three ways to advance the interests of young people in climate change discourses. First, we show how these discourses are indebted to while also changing understandings of young people in late modern societies. Second, we consider the potential impacts of these stories on young lives and on responses to climate change. Third, we identify prospects for new stories to emerge as young voices become increasingly important in urgent social discussions of climate change. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change Communication Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change Perceptions of Climate Change
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 07-11-2022
DOI: 10.1071/WF22099
Abstract: Background Information c aigns about bushfire preparedness are often based on the assumption that residents of bushfire-prone neighbourhoods underestimate their risk. However, there are complex relationships between bushfire hazard, perceived risk and adaptive action. Aims We investigate how residents’ understanding of bushfire risk relates to biophysical risk in the City of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia’s most fire-prone state capital. Methods A transdisciplinary case study using a survey of 406 residents living close to the wildland–urban interface, focus groups in four bushfire-prone neighbourhoods, and geospatial fire risk assessment. Key results Neighbourhood concern about bushfire is statistically associated with biophysical measurement of local bushfire risk. This awareness does not necessarily translate into adaptive action, in part because residents underestimate the risk to their homes from fuels on their own property and overestimate the risk from bushland and neighbouring properties, leading to a common response that preparing for bushfire is futile if your neighbours do not also prepare. Neighbourhoods with high levels of positive community interaction, however, are more likely to access preparedness information, and develop fire-adaptive behaviours. Conclusions/Implications Our findings highlight the need for social adaptation pathways using local communication interventions to build the neighbourhood knowledge, networks and capacities that enable community-led bushfire preparedness.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-07-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-02-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-12-2019
Abstract: Extensive research into public attitudes about climate change commonly portrays those who do not express concern about this issue as unwitting victims of their own or others’ biases. Characterised as apathy, ignorance, scepticism or denial, absence of concern about climate change has been presented as being rooted in an in idual’s lack of considered engagement with scientific reasons for concern. This ‘concern deficit’ is framed as a problem to be addressed through policy, education and communication that seeks to maximise concern about climate change. In contrast, we conceptualise unconcern about climate change as an expression of focal life concerns that are incommensurable with dominant narratives of climate change. Originating in active cognitive, social and experiential processes, we regard unconcern about climate change as inseparable from the lived contexts in which it is expressed and irreducible to the attitudes or attributes of in iduals. Using narrative analysis of repeat in-depth interviews with Australians who express unconcern about climate change, we find that this unconcern has multiple sources, takes erse forms and is entangled in epistemological and normative engagements with other issues. It is constituted through social relationships, discursive processes, moral values and embodied experiences that are overlooked in much existing research. We argue that respectful attention to the experiential conditions in which concern about climate change is resisted can enable constructive re-negotiation of narratives of climate change. Such agonistic processes could lead to more reflexive, pluralist and dialogical forms of discourse that better articulate climate science and policy with a wider ersity of lived concerns.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-07-2023
DOI: 10.1002/PAN3.10495
Abstract: Over recent decades, our understanding of climate change has accelerated greatly, but unfortunately, observable impacts have increased in tandem. Both mitigation and adaptation have not progressed at the level or scale warranted by our collective knowledge on climate change. More effective approaches to engage people on current and future anthropogenic climate change effects are urgently needed. Here, we show how species whose distributions are shifting in response to climate change, that is, ‘species‐on‐the‐move’, present an opportunity to engage people with climate change by linking to human values, and our deep connections with the places in which we live, in a locally relevant yet globally coherent narrative. Species‐on‐the‐move can impact ecosystem structure and function, food security, human health, livelihoods, culture and even the climate itself through feedback to the climate system, presenting a wide variety of potential pathways for people to understand that climate change affects them personally as in iduals. Citizen science focussed on documenting changes in bio ersity is one approach to foster a deeper engagement on climate change. However, other possible avenues, which may offer potential to engage people currently unconnected with nature, include arts, games or collaborations with rural agriculture (e.g. new occurrences of pest species) or fisheries organisations (e.g. shifting stocks) or healthcare providers (e.g. changing distributions of disease vectors). Through the importance we place on the aspects of life impacted by the redistribution of species around us, species‐on‐the‐move offer emotional pathways to connect with people on the complex issue of climate change in profound ways that have the potential to engender interest and action on climate change. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-06-2021
Abstract: Antarctic “gateway” cities have been characterised primarily as portals through which goods and services from around the world can be transported to the frozen continent. However, recent research suggests that this concept should be expanded to address other forms of connectivity, including those felt by people living in these cities rather than simply passing through them. In this article, we explore the meaning of urban relations to Antarctica in the 21st century, focusing on the Australian city of Hobart. We outline evolving understandings of gateway cities, and of Antarctic gateways particularly examine Hobart’s erse connections to the far south and analyse current public policy related to the city’s “gateway” status. We then report the results of a survey ( n = 300) conducted in 2018 to investigate how citizens understand their city’s relationship with Antarctica. Survey results show that residents prioritised ecological concerns over economic or political issues and felt strongly that the city should play a custodian role in the future of Antarctica. Hobartians’ strong sense of environmental and cultural connectedness with Antarctica suggests a need to rethink the concept of Antarctic gateways if policy is to reflect adequately the meaning of this identity to residents of the cities that circle the southern continent.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 04-2021
No related grants have been discovered for Chloe Lucas.