Protecting Homes and Communities: Perceptions about the Benefits of Adaptation Policies

• In Event: Crisis and Disaster: Public Policies for Response, Resilience, and Transformation

Abstract

Exposure to climate risks is widely—though not evenly—distributed across the landscape, and the benefits of policies and investments to reduce vulnerability to those risks accrue at multiple scales. Policies like subsidies for property improvements deliver mostly private benefits, protecting individual households in a way that is largely separable from their neighbors. Others, like floodplain restoration projects, offer risk reduction at a larger spatial scale. Benefits from either type of policy can be highly variable across households because of differences in built environment and household resources, and many adaptation policies jointly produce some blend of private and public benefits, as when the floodplain restoration creates new viewscapes and recreational opportunities for nearby neighbors. While these distributions of benefits are partly intrinsic to the policy and its implementation, political processes shape how the public perceives these distributions, possibly affecting public support for different adaptation actions.

This paper presents evidence from two large surveys on public perceptions about the benefits from adaptation policies. Data from a 2024 survey of US residents shows, for ten different policies, how the public perceives benefits being distributed on a scale from mostly household benefits to mostly community benefits. Parallel construction in policy descriptions and random assignment of policies across respondents allows testing of differences between policy features, including climate hazard (flood v. fire) and policy rules (e.g., voluntary v. mandatory property buyouts). A 2025 survey of California residents tests whether characterizing a climate impact as experienced individually, as compared to collectively, affects Californians’ concern about that impact and their support for government action to address it. Results from these studies will contribute to understanding about public tolerance for the privatization of responsibility for climate adaptation.

Author

• Megan Mullin, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author