Abstract
A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants have spiritual values that explain their feelings of connectedness to Nature which in turn may account for high levels of pessimism about the current state of the global/Pacific environment. Concern about climate change as a future livelihood stressor in the Pacific region is ubiquitous at both societal and personal levels. While participants exhibited a degree of understanding matching objective rankings about the vulnerability of their home islands/countries, a spatial optimism bias was evident in which ‘other places’ were invariably regarded as ‘worse’. Through their views on climate change concern, respondents also favoured a psychological distancing of environmental risk in which ‘other places’ were perceived as more exposed than familiar ones. Influence from spirituality is implicated in both findings. Most interventions intended to reduce exposure to environmental risk and to enable effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands region have failed to acknowledge influences on decisionmaking of spirituality and connectedness to Nature. Messages that stress environmental conservation and stewardship, particularly if communicated within familiar and respected religious contexts, are likely to be more successful than secular ones.
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Notes
In this paper, Nature is capitalized when used to signify the environment not merely as a natural system but as one with spiritual dimensions, the way Pacific people commonly conceive it.
This question was placed halfway through the survey and asked participants to select ‘strongly disagree’ in response to the statement that ‘polar bears are cuddly’.
This represents the end-2013 figure according to the quarterly report of Roy Morgan Research (www.roymorgan.com) that is now projected to be closer to 50 % but like the 2011 Australian Census, in which 81 % of Australians identified with a religion, it does not separate declared religion from routinely-practiced religion, which is what the USP data show.
Since this survey used six Likert categories from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ whereas our survey used just five, the numbers are not directly comparable. If only the two strongest levels of agreement from the Australian survey are used, the figures become 40 % and 48 % respectively, significantly lower than the USP figures.
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Nunn, P.D., Mulgrew, K., Scott-Parker, B. et al. Spirituality and attitudes towards Nature in the Pacific Islands: insights for enabling climate-change adaptation. Climatic Change 136, 477–493 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1646-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1646-9