Natural Disaster Mitigation, Public Opinion and a Propensity To Discount The Future

Despite the growing urgency of scientists’ warnings, much of public opinion remains wary of major expenditures and life style changes to mitigate future dangers from climate change. The impact is said to threaten mainly poorer countries, off the radar of wealthy polluters. Economists claim there is a universal human desire to discount the future, decreasingly valued the more distant. The worst dangers will strike many decades in the future and, even if they last for centuries or millennia, much of the damage can be discounted to zero. Sociologists point to the greater salience of local and manifest experience over seemingly abstract and uncertain models and long term global scenarios, but also note that a cultural and social shift to short term values is recent and not universal or irreversible.

A recent increase in manifest and unpredicted climate disasters, which have already struck both rich and poor countries, may in time encourage changes in public perception and a greater willingness to act. Scientists are now focussing on the effect of small rises in average global temperatures on the frequency and intensity of extremes in general, and on the measurable probability of them having already contributed to specific droughts, floods, storms and fires.

A nationwide Nielsen survey of 7500 Australians, commissioned by the authors, gives some indication of changing values. Willingness to contribute ‘substantial but affordable sums on a regular basis’ for mitigation of future risks from natural disasters was systematically greater in younger cohorts and for those with direct or indirect experience of them. It  varied little between risks ‘in the next two years’, ‘during your lifetime’ and ‘in centuries to come’, suggesting no progressive discounting of the future.