Climate change beliefs and hazard mitigation behaviors: homeowners and wildfire risk

Downscaled climate models provide projections of how climate change may exacerbate the local impacts of natural hazards. The extent to which people facing exacerbated hazard conditions understand or respond to climate-related changes to local hazards has been largely overlooked. In this article, we examine the relationships among climate change beliefs, environmental beliefs, and hazard mitigation actions in the context of wildfire, a natural hazard projected to be intensified by climate change. We find that survey respondents are situated across a continuum between being believers' and deniers' that is multidimensional. Placement on this believer-denier spectrum is related to general environmental attitudes. We fail, however, to find a relationship between climate change beliefs and wildfire risk-reduction actions in general. In contrast, we find a statistically significant positive relationship between level of wildfire risk mitigation and being a climate denier. Further, certain pro-environmental attitudes are found to have a statistically significant negative association with the level of wildfire risk mitigation.