Extreme Weather Events: Perception, Pro-Environmental Behavior, and the Tools to Measure Them

Understanding the motivations and barriers to pro-environmental behavior is essential in mitigating climate change. Extreme weather events may act as focusing events that disrupt routines and encourage pro-environmental behavior, but the inability to reliably measure behavior makes it challenging to study. We used two representative surveys of US residents to administer the REBL Scale, a unidimensional and invariant measure of short-term, pro-environmental behavior. We used factor analytic models to investigate whether experience with extreme weather events influenced REBL scores, either directly or indirectly, as well as whether the effect was mediated or moderated by psychological distance to climate change and attribution of weather events to climate change, respectively. Experience with extreme weather events had both significant direct and indirect effects on REBL scores. Respondents who reported being affected by extreme weather were more likely to have performed pro-environmental behaviors in the last week. Psychological distance was a significant mediator of the indirect effect, which was stronger than the direct effect. The moderating effect of attribution of events to climate change was ambiguous; two methods of latent moderation produced conflicting results. The results suggest that experiences with extreme weather may influence behavior even while controlling for political preferences. Psychological distance could be an important factor in designing behavioral interventions. The moderating effect of attribution deserves further research, as do the latent moderation methods we use to study interactions.