Chad Zanocco

The effect of industry activities on public support for ‘fracking’

ABSTRACT Research suggests that previous, current, and prospective extractive industry activities influence perceptions of new development. Studies that have drawn this conclusion, however, have usually focused on specific projects in specific communities. Here, these factors are examined on an aggregate, national scale. Combining geospatial data on extractive industry activities and survey data from a nationally representative sample (N = 1061), the influence of extractive industry activities on support for fracking is studied. While limited evidence is found for the impact of proximity to oil and gas wells or production on support for fracking, employment levels in the natural resources and mining sector in the respondent’s county and residence in an area experiencing active oil and gas development significantly increase support for fracking. The results highlight the role of spatial and community factors in shaping support for energy development.

Community climate change beliefs, awareness, and actions in the wake of the September 2013 flooding in Boulder County, Colorado

Scholars and activists alike contend that extreme weather events may provide the best opportunity for raising public awareness and perhaps even instigating action related to climate change. We explore whether the September 2013 floods were associated with local climate change beliefs and actions after the event via an in-depth case study in Boulder County, CO. Based on analysis of local newspapers and policy documents, responses from an event-specific survey, and semi-structured interviews, we show that Boulder County residents readily connected the flooding event to climate change despite competing scientific claims about the link. Moreover, while the event did not necessarily alter existing climate change beliefs, it did create a greater sense of vulnerability to and increased awareness of the risks posed by climate change. In terms of climate change action after the event, residents and policymakers appeared to place a greater emphasis on adaptation to future extreme events, with a focus on building resilience through social capital. Yet, we also uncovered a complex relationship between social capital and resilience, particularly in terms of the impact of the event on already marginalized and vulnerable populations. This study adds to a growing body of research on climate change beliefs and actions in the wake of extreme weather events.

Mapping Out Climate Change: Assessing How Coastal Communities Adapt Using Alternative Future Scenarios

ABSTRACT Lipiec, E.; Ruggiero, P.; Mills, A.; Serafin, K.A.; Bolte, J.; Corcoran, P.; Stevenson, J.; Zanocco, C., and Lach, D., 2018. Mapping out climate change: Assessing how coastal communities adapt using alternative future scenarios. Coastal communities are increasingly experiencing climate change–induced coastal disasters and chronic flooding and erosion. Decision makers and the public alike are struggling to reconcile the lack of “fit” between a rapidly changing environment and relatively rigid governance structures. In efforts to bridge this environment-governance gap in Tillamook County, Oregon, stakeholders formed a knowledge-to-action network (KTAN). The KTAN examined alternative future coastal policy and climate scenarios through extensive stakeholder engagement and the spatially explicit agent-based modeling framework Envision. The KTANs results were further evaluated through a two-step mixed methods approach. First, KTAN-identified metrics were quantitatively assessed and compared under present-day vs. alternative policy scenarios. Second, the feasibility of implementing these policy scenarios was qualitatively evaluated through a review of governmental regulations and semistructured interviews. The findings show that alternative policy scenarios ranged from significantly beneficial to extremely harmful to coastal buildings and beach accessibility in comparison to present-day policies, and they were relatively feasible to almost impossible to implement. Beneficial policies that lower impacts of flooding and erosion clearly diverge from the existing regulatory environment, which inhibits their implementation. In response, leadership and cross-sector cooperation and coordination can help to overcome mixed interests and motivations, and increase information exchange between and within the public and government organizations. The combination of stakeholder engagement, an alternative futures modeling framework, and the robust quantitative and qualitative evaluation of policy scenarios provides a powerful model for coastal communities hoping to adapt to climate change along any coastline.

Co-producing software for complex environmental data visualization

Environmental scientists, land managers, and policy actors are increasingly presented with high-stakes high-uncertainty problems stemming from human-ecosystem interactions. To address these problems, scientists and managers frequently use models that produce enormous geospatial and temporal datasets that are constantly modified. To help make sense of this complex and changing data, we are immersed in a co-production effort where software engineers and environmental scientists collaborate on the development of visualization software. Preliminary findings suggest that this software co-production process could help build legitimacy for the information it produces, with potential implications for generating actionable science for policy and governance.

Exploring the impacts of climate and policy changes on coastal community resilience: Simulating alternative future scenarios

Abstract Coupled models of coastal hazards, ecosystems, socioeconomics, and landscape management in conjunction with alternative scenario analysis provide tools that can allow decision-makers to explore effects of policy decisions under uncertain futures. Here, we describe the development and assessment of a set of model-based alternative future scenarios examining climate and population driven landscape dynamics for a coastal region in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. These scenarios incorporated coupled spatiotemporal models of climate and coastal hazards, population and development, and policy and assessed a variety of landscape metrics for each scenario. Coastal flooding and erosion were probabilistically simulated using 99 future 95-year climate scenarios. Five policy scenarios were iteratively co-developed by researchers and stakeholders in Tillamook County, Oregon. Results suggest that both climate change and management decisions have a significant impact across the landscape, and can potentially impact geographic regions at different magnitudes and timescales.

Place, proximity, and perceived harm: extreme weather events and views about climate change

Advances in event attribution have improved scientific confidence in linking climate change to extreme weather severity and frequency, but this confidence varies by event type. Yet, scholars and activists argue that extreme weather events may provide the best opportunity to raise awareness and prompt action on climate change. We focus on four cases of extreme weather with low attribution (tornado outbreaks in Laurel County, Kentucky, and Winston County, Mississippi; wildfires in Yavapai County, Arizona, and Lake County, California). We survey county residents to examine the role of event proximity, community- and event-specific characteristics, and reported harm in shaping climate change views post-event. Using multilevel regression analysis, we find that reported personal and community harm aligns with event proximity and larger community damages. For our respondents’ climate change views, however, political ideology dominates, suggesting the importance of motivated reasoning in individual interpretations of extreme weather events. At the same time, while event proximity is irrelevant, we find reported harm to be related to climate change views. Thus, while respondents appear to be making connections between extreme weather events and climate change among our four cases, these connections seem to be most likely to occur in communities where belief in climate change is already high, the event caused significant impacts and is more attributable to climate change, and elites frame the event in these terms—as in Lake County. Our findings are particularly relevant for policymakers and activists looking to such events as catalysts for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Proximity to Development and Public Support for Hydraulic Fracturing

Research on the relationship between proximity to energy development and public support for said development has produced conflicting results. Moreover, our understanding of this relationship in the context of unconventional oil and gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing becomes even cloudier because of limited data. Drawing on a unique dataset that includes both geo-coded data from nationally representative surveys conducted from 2012 to 2016 (9 waves; n=19,098) and high-resolution well location data, we examine how proximity to new unconventional oil and gas wells shapes familiarity with and support for hydraulic fracturing. After controlling for various individual and contextual factors, we find that proximity to new development is linked to both greater familiarity with and more sup- port for hydraulic fracturing – a relationship that is similar in magnitude to the marginal effects of income, gender and age. We discuss the implications of these findings for effective risk communication, as well as the importance of incorporating spatial analysis into public opinion research on perceptions of energy development.