Inwald Joshua F, Bruine de Bruin Wändi, Yaggi Marc, Árvai Joseph
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90007, United States.
Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90007, United States.
Environ Sci Technol. 2023 Feb 7;57(5):2075-2083. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.2c03964. Epub 2023 Jan 25.
Water safety refers to the quality of one's drinking water and whether it lacks dangerous contaminants. Limited access to safe water is projected to impact approximately 5 billion people worldwide by 2050. Climate change and worsening severe weather events pose increasing threats to global water safety. However, people may not perceive links between climate change and water safety, potentially undermining their willingness to implement behaviors that improve water safety. Existing studies on water safety risk perceptions have mostly been conducted in single-country contexts, which limits researchers' ability to make cross-national comparisons. Here, we assessed the extent to which people's severe weather concern and climate change concern predict their water safety concern. Our analyses used survey data from the 142-country 2019 Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, including 21 low-income and 34 lower-middle-income countries. In mixed-effects models, severe weather concern was significantly more predictive of water safety concern than was climate change concern, although both resulted in positive associations. Worldwide, this finding was robust, insensitive to key model specifications and countries' varying protection against unsafe drinking water. We suggest communicators and policymakers improve messaging about water safety and other environmental threats by explaining how they are impacted by worsening severe weather.
水安全是指个人饮用水的质量以及是否含有危险污染物。预计到2050年，全球约50亿人将受到安全用水供应有限的影响。气候变化和日益严重的极端天气事件对全球水安全构成了越来越大的威胁。然而，人们可能并未意识到气候变化与水安全之间存在联系，这可能会削弱他们采取改善水安全行为的意愿。现有的关于水安全风险认知的研究大多是在单一国家背景下进行的，这限制了研究人员进行跨国比较的能力。在此，我们评估了人们对极端天气的担忧和对气候变化的担忧在多大程度上能够预测他们对水安全的担忧。我们的分析使用了2019年劳氏船级社基金会世界风险调查中来自142个国家的调查数据，其中包括21个低收入国家和34个中低收入国家。在混合效应模型中，对极端天气的担忧比气候变化担忧更能显著预测对水安全的担忧，尽管两者都呈现出正相关关系。在全球范围内，这一发现具有稳健性，不受关键模型规格以及各国对不安全饮用水不同保护措施的影响。我们建议传播者和政策制定者通过解释极端天气恶化如何影响水安全及其他环境威胁，来改善关于水安全和其他环境威胁的信息传播。
