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Effects of local drought condition on public opinions about water supply and future climate change

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Abstract

A growing body of research indicates that opinions about long-term climate change and other natural resource issues can be significantly affected by current weather conditions (e.g., outside air temperature) and other highly contingent environmental cues. Although increased severity and frequency of droughts is regarded as a likely consequence of anthropogenic climate change, little previous research has attempted to relate the experience of drought with public attitudes about water supply or water-related climate change issues. For this study, a large set (n = 3,163) of public survey data collected across nine states of the southern United States was spatio-temporally linked with records of short-term (~12 weeks) and long-term (~5 years) drought condition at the level of each respondent’s zip code. Multivariate ordinal logistic regression models that included numerous other independent variables (environmental ideology, age, gender, education, community size, residency duration, and local annual precipitation) indicated highly significant interactions with long-term drought condition, but showed no significant effect from short-term drought condition. Conversely, attitudes about water-related climate change showed highly significant interactions with short-term drought, with weaker to no effects from long-term drought. While the finding of significant effects from short-term drought condition on opinions about future drought is broadly consistent with previous public opinion research on climate change, the finding of water supply attitudes being more responsive to longer term drought condition is, to our knowledge, a novel result. This study more generally demonstrates the methodological feasibility and applied importance of accounting for local drought condition when public opinion information is used to evaluate outreach programs for water conservation and climate change.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was developed through the authors’ participation in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Southern Region Water Policy and Economics team. We sincerely thank K. Loeffelman for her management and assistance with the National Water Survey dataset. We also sincerely thank C. Paulsen from the National Drought Mitigation Center for sharing background references and boundary shapefile used in the U.S. Drought Monitor datasets. Invaluable feedback through the analysis and manuscript preparation process was provided by J. Reeves and K. Love-Myers at the University of Georgia’s Statistical Consulting Center. Insightful comments from three anonymous reviewers provided the basis for substantial improvements to the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jason M. Evans.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Online Resource 1

GIS workflow for developing drought condition scores. (DOC 70 kb)

Online Resource 2

Dates of state surveys and associated dates of U.S. Drought Monitor shapefiles used to calculate drought condition scores. (DOC 40 kb)

Online Resource 3

Long-term and short-term drought condition scores by Southern Region survey zip code. (DOC 555 kb)

Online Resource 4

Mean annual precipitation for states included in the Southern Region survey (adapted from Daly and Taylor 2000). (DOC 173 kb)

Online Resource 5

Scaled image provided to respondents for “Environmental ideology” question. (DOC 117 kb)

Online Resource 6

Independent socio-demographic variables from survey instrument (DOC 47 kb)

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Evans, J.M., Calabria, J., Borisova, T. et al. Effects of local drought condition on public opinions about water supply and future climate change. Climatic Change 132, 193–207 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1425-z

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