Climate Change Risk Perception in Southeast Asian Countries

• In Event: How Do They Understand the Science? Communicating Science, Risks, and Disasters 1

Abstract

Recent extreme weather in all over the world effect on people's everyday lives and also on the perception of climate change. We are currently working on the project about people's lifestyles and sustainability in Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar. In interviewing people about everyday lives, we realized that people often mentioned about the recent extreme weather, such as flood, or Typhoon, especially in southern Vietnam. People often connected natural disasters or other accidents with climate change. Sometimes they said, "I watched it on the television."
Most stories are about "adaptation" aspects of climate change. People hardly referred to the so-called "mitigation" aspects of the climate change, such as saving energy. In those regions, income restriction limited household energy consumption. People have to save energy for the sake of saving own money.
In this paper, we report the public perception of climate change in Southeast Asian countries and their understandings of climate risk.

Authors

• Midori Aoyagi, National Institute for Environmental Studies

• Vu Quoc Huy, Institute of regional sustainable development, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences