Thomas G. Safford

Tracking Public Beliefs About Anthropogenic Climate Change.

A simple question about climate change, with one choice designed to match consensus statements by scientists, was asked on 35 US nationwide, single-state or regional surveys from 2010 to 2015. Analysis of these data (over 28,000 interviews) yields robust and exceptionally well replicated findings on public beliefs about anthropogenic climate change, including regional variations, change over time, demographic bases, and the interacting effects of respondent education and political views. We find that more than half of the US public accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities. A sizable, politically opposite minority (about 30 to 40%) concede the fact of climate change, but believe it has mainly natural causes. Few (about 10 to 15%) say they believe climate is not changing, or express no opinion. The overall proportions appear relatively stable nationwide, but exhibit place-to-place variations. Detailed analysis of 21 consecutive surveys within one fairly representative state (New Hampshire) finds a mild but statistically significant rise in agreement with the scientific consensus over 2010–2015. Effects from daily temperature are detectable but minor. Hurricane Sandy, which brushed New Hampshire but caused no disaster there, shows no lasting impact on that state’s time series—suggesting that non-immediate weather disasters have limited effects. In all datasets political orientation dominates among individual-level predictors of climate beliefs, moderating the otherwise positive effects from education. Acceptance of anthropogenic climate change rises with education among Democrats and Independents, but not so among Republicans. The continuing series of surveys provides a baseline for tracking how future scientific, political, socioeconomic or climate developments impact public acceptance of the scientific consensus.

Environmental Views from the Coast: Public Concern about Local to Global Marine Issues

Surveys conducted in 2009–2012 asked residents of eight U.S. coastal regions about ocean-related environmental problems. Analysis of these multiregion data tests how individual characteristics predict views on locally focused marine issues, and whether after controlling for individual characteristics there remain systematic place-to-place variations. We find two kinds of place effects: some related to broad attributes such as resource employment, and others explained by local society–environment relations. Apart from these place effects, the individual-level predictors of coastal environmental concerns resemble those seen elsewhere for non-coastal environmental concerns, including effects from age, gender, and education. Political party, however, proves to be the most consistent predictor across issues from local to global in scale. Significant education effects offer support for an information deficit model of coastal concerns, but the pervasive partisanship and education × party interactions suggest that ideology-linked processes of biased assimilation and elite cues filter how information is acquired.

In the Wake of the Spill: Environmental Views Along the Gulf Coast

Objectives. We analyze patterns in environmental views of Gulf Coast residents, in the wake of the 2010 oil spill. To what extent do spill-related and other environmental views vary with individual characteristics, personal experience with the spill, or characteristics of place? Methods. About 2,000 residents of selected coastal regions in Louisiana and Florida were interviewed by telephone in late summer 2010. Results. One-quarter of the respondents said that their environmental views had changed as a result of the spill. Despite reporting more change, more spill effects, and greater threats from climate-induced sea-level rise, Louisiana respondents were less likely to support a deepwater moratorium, alternative energy, or resource conservation. Conclusions. Results are consistent with real effects from the spill. Differences betweenLouisianaandFloridarespondentsarenotexplainedbyspilleffectsorindividual characteristics, however. The patterns reflect biophysical differences of the coastlines that shaped their socioeconomic development. On April 20, 2010, an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform off Louisiana killed 11 workers and touched off the largest marine oil spill in history. Oil from a ruptured pipe poured into the deep sea for three months, televised live via robot-operated cameras. Regulatory failures together with shortcuts in safety equipment and procedures precipitated this accident,butintheimmediateaftermathquestionsofblametooksecondplace to worries about the scale of the disaster. By mid-June, oil was washing ashore on wetlands, barrier islands, and beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. An estimated 4.4 million barrels escaped before the wellhead was successfully capped on July 15, and closure ensured by a relief well on September 19 (Crone and Tolstoy, 2010). As oil poured into the sea during the summer of 2010, economic and political waves spread ahead of the oil. Much of the Gulf quickly was closed

Flood Realities, Perceptions and the Depth of Divisions on Climate

Research has led to broad agreement among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening now and likely to worsen. In contrast to scientific agreement, US public views remain deeply divided, largely along ideological lines. Science communication has been neutralised in some arenas by intense counter-messaging, but as adverse climate impacts become manifest they might intervene more persuasively in local perceptions. We look for evidence of this occurring with regard to realities and perceptions of flooding in the northeastern US state of New Hampshire. Although precipitation and flood damage have increased, with ample news coverage, most residents do not see a trend. Nor do perceptions about past and future local flooding correlate with regional impacts or vulnerability. Instead, such perceptions follow ideological patterns resembling those of global climate change. That information about the physical world can be substantially filtered by ideology is a common finding from sociological environment/society research.

Environmental Awareness and Public Support for Protecting and Restoring Puget Sound

In an effort to garner consensus around environmental programs, practitioners have attempted to increase awareness about environmental threats and demonstrate the need for action. Nonetheless, how beliefs about the scope and severity of different types of environmental concerns shape support for management interventions are less clear. Using data from a telephone survey of residents of the Puget Sound region of Washington, we investigate how perceptions of the severity of different coastal environmental problems, along with other social factors, affect attitudes about policy options. We find that self-assessed environmental understanding and views about the seriousness of pollution, habitat loss, and salmon declines are only weakly related. Among survey respondents, women, young people, and those who believe pollution threatens Puget Sound are more likely to support policy measures such as increased enforcement and spending on restoration. Conversely, self-identified Republicans and individuals who view current regulations as ineffective tend to oppose governmental actions aimed at protecting and restoring Puget Sound. Support for one policy measure—tax credits for environmentally-friendly business practices—is not significantly affected by political party affiliation. These findings demonstrate that environmental awareness can influence public support for environmental policy tools. However, the nature of particular management interventions and other social forces can have important mitigating effects and need to be considered by practitioners attempting to develop environment-related social indicators and generate consensus around the need for action to address environmental problems.

Stakeholder Collaboration and Organizational Innovation in the Planning of the Deschutes Estuary Feasibility Study

Coastal managers have sought to enhance the collaborative inputs of stakeholder groups into management activities. Nonetheless, established organizational approaches have led to primarily consultative forms of engagement and constrained citizen involvement in formative activities. In Olympia, Washington, managers overseeing the Deschutes Estuary Feasibility Study (DEFS) implemented an innovative cooperative research planning initiative that diverged from conventional consultative processes. Stakeholders, rather than government officials, identified the research priorities for the socioeconomic component of this restoration feasibility study. This design method altered the traditional roles and responsibilities of different organizational actors, and the involvement of citizen groups in these formative activities changed the relationship between governmental and nongovernmental actors. Using conceptual frameworks from organizational sociology, this study develops insights into the behavior of the organizations involved with the DEFS cooperative planning effort, demonstrating how engaging stakeholders in formative research planning activities may foster new types of collaboration among coastal management organizations.

Planning Salmon Recovery: Applying Sociological Concepts to Spawn New Organizational Insights

Restoring salmon is a complex organizational as well as technical endeavor. The Washington Salmon Recovery Planning Act has played a key role in these efforts by stimulating the creation of local planning organizations known as lead entities. This study utilizes conceptual and theoretical tools from organizational sociology to analyze regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional forces shaping the structure and behavior of lead entity organizations in the Puget Sound region. Findings demonstrate that the regulative influence of the act only partly explains the distinct structure and behavior of lead entities. Other institutional influences such as the normative importance of technically driven salmon recovery approaches and the culture of localism embedded in these multiparty groups are equally important in explaining the organization of lead entity planning. Results from this study illustrate how research built upon theoretical insights from organizational sociology may provide planners with novel insights into the organization of natural resource management.

The Political–Technical Divide and Collaborative Management in Brazil’s Taquari Basin

Elected officials and managers are both integral players in natural resource management. Politicians and technicians recognize that interdependencies exist, but finding organizational models that effectively integrate the distinct political and technical aspects of these endeavors remains a challenge. In Brazil’s Taquari Basin, leaders formed a watershed-based intermunicipal consortium in an attempt to achieve such integration. The experience of this consortium shows that organizing management around watersheds does not naturally lead to political—technical integration. The institutional separation of political and technical activities within this consortium’s structure generated divergent beliefs about appropriate functions for a watershed-based organization, ultimately impeding collaboration. Efforts to overcome these differences were largely unsuccessful, as the communication strategies employed were based on flawed understandings of the interests and objectives of politicians and technicians, respectively. This study draws on conceptual frameworks from organizational sociology to uncover the social forces that both facilitate and impede collaboration across the political—technical divide.

At the Confluence of Data Streams: Mapping Paired Social and Biophysical Landscapes on the Puget Sound's Edge

ABSTRACT We seek to expand interdisciplinary insights into coastal management by pairing survey data from the general public with attendant landscape data in the Puget Sound region. Our social survey gathered information regarding attitudes and perceptions of changing social and environmental conditions in the Puget Sound Basin as well as views regarding possible management interventions. We mapped the survey data to US zip code regions and spatially overlaid the survey response data with existing geospatial data layers of biophysical conditions. Using mixed-effects logistic regression we examine the relationships between urban development trajectories and individual views about both environmental problems and possible policy responses. We found significant relationships between peoples responses and the physical conditions within their residence zip code, as well as social variables, which illustrated the importance of developing new analytical approaches that consider the relationships between both biophysical and social features and individual attitudes about coastal environmental concerns.

A Review of: “Scholz, John T. and Bruce Stiftel, eds. Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict: New Institutions for Collaborative Planning

To those not familiar with the southeastern United States, tropical Florida might seem a surprising locale for studying conflicts over water. Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict vividly illustrates that balancing competing demands for water is no longer an issue only for the arid West but for seemingly wet regions as well. By focusing on one of the most environmentally and socially diverse states in the United States, John Scholz and Bruce Stiftel present an effective platform for examining the benefits of adaptive governance in complex social and ecological contexts. This edited volume provides a wealth of empirical data on the social, institutional, and ecological challenges facing resource management practitioners and includes a range of analytical insights that will be of interest to managers and academics alike. Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict identifies five central challenges facing water governance systems: (1) representation (Who should be involved?), (2) decision processes (How can authorities and involved stakeholders reach policy agreements that serve them well?), (3) scientific learning (How can policymakers develop and use knowledge effectively?), (4) public learning (How can resource users and the relevant public develop common understandings as a foundation for consensual polices and policy processes?), and (5) problem responsiveness (How well do the decisions achieve natural resource management goals, including sustainability, equity, and efficiency?). Scholz and Stiftel use this set of challenges as an organizational framework for both the empirical and analytical material in this book. This approach illustrates the salience of this framework both as a heuristic for understanding common issues inherent to water conflicts and as a conceptual tool for guiding applied research on governance systems. Some of the most intriguing information in this volume is found in the eight governance cases highlighting the array of water quality, quantity, and habitat issues facing Florida’s resource managers. On the surface, the editors’ decision to jump from agricultural pollution in the Sewannee Basin, to urban supply issues in Tampa, and on to water conservation in the Everglades might seem ill advised. Nonetheless, the aforementioned analytical framework provides continuity in these data and underscores the need for a governance paradigm that integrates the management of water quality and quantity as well as habitat conservation. The chapter on the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint Basin, which includes the neighboring states of Georgia and Alabama, illustrates that interstate wrangling over water, traditionally associated with western rivers such as the Colorado, is equally problematic in the Society and Natural Resources, 21:175–177 Copyright # 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-1920 print/1521-0723 online DOI: 10.1080/08941920701756847