Attribution of environmental outcomes to climate change: Perceptions of coastal communities in the Caribbean

Abstract

Attribution of environmental outcomes to climate change is a live debate in scholarly and policy circles. Non-scientific attribution by the lay public has value for enriching the discourse, engagements, and decisions on loss and damage, adaptation and mitigation, communication strategies, and the science-policy interface from local to international levels. There is a need for context-specific studies on perceived climate attribution by the lay public. Unlike the few previous studies that focused on attribution of extreme events to climate change by the lay public, the current paper assessed the key compositional and contextual factors that influence the attribution of environmental outcomes with slow onset to climate change. This study surveyed 441 households in eight small coastal communities in three Caribbean countries and applied a generalized linear regression model with a complementary log-log link to assess the relationship between compositional and contextual factors that influence perceived linkage between climate change and environmental outcome. At the bivariate level, the results showed that ethnicity, marital status, household head highest education, household income, and community of living were significant predictors of the likelihood of the perceived linkage between climate change and worsening environmental outcome. At the multivariate level, when all factors have been accounted for, we found that respondents with higher education were 160% more likely to indicate that climate change has adverse effects on environmental outcomes. Respondents with 10 or more years of experience in their present occupation were 73% more likely to suggest a linkage between climate change and worse environmental outcomes. Other strong predictors included income, ethnicity and community of residence. The perceived relationship between climate change and environmental outcomes differed systematically based on the compositional and contextual attributes of respondents. Several significant relationships at the bivariate level persisted at the multivariate level, indicating that the perceived linkages are robust and entrenched. It is concluded that there are heterogeneities in the perceived relationship between climate change and environmental outcomes based on the compositional and contextual factors of the households. Higher education and longer experience in the same occupation contribute significantly to climate attribution by the lay public.