TY - JOUR

T1 - Place attachment and perception of climate change as a threat in rural and urban areas

AU - Tenbrink, Thora

AU - Willcock, Simon

N1 - Copyright: © 2023 Tenbrink, Willcock. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

PY - 2023/9/6

Y1 - 2023/9/6

N2 - Climate change is a global threat to ecosystems and the people that depend on them. However, the perceived threat of climate change may vary spatially. Previous research suggests that inhabitants in rural areas show higher levels of place attachment (associating meaning with a specific place) than urbanites, possibly because rural people depend more directly on their local environment. This can shape perceptions and behaviours, such as enhanced willingness to engage in landscape preservation. Here we ask if it also makes rural people perceive climate change as a greater threat, using a representative sample of 1,071 survey respondents from across the United Kingdom (UK) to provide first-order insights. We found that, whilst indicators of place attachment were indeed more frequent in rural areas, the perceived threat of climate change in the most rural locations was lower. We discuss possible explanations for this pattern (including lower levels of awareness of the anthropogenic causes of climate change, lessened first-hand experiences of climate change impacts due to higher levels of regulating ecosystem services, and higher levels of resilience in rural areas related to a closer relationship with nature), and call for further research to investigate this.

AB - Climate change is a global threat to ecosystems and the people that depend on them. However, the perceived threat of climate change may vary spatially. Previous research suggests that inhabitants in rural areas show higher levels of place attachment (associating meaning with a specific place) than urbanites, possibly because rural people depend more directly on their local environment. This can shape perceptions and behaviours, such as enhanced willingness to engage in landscape preservation. Here we ask if it also makes rural people perceive climate change as a greater threat, using a representative sample of 1,071 survey respondents from across the United Kingdom (UK) to provide first-order insights. We found that, whilst indicators of place attachment were indeed more frequent in rural areas, the perceived threat of climate change in the most rural locations was lower. We discuss possible explanations for this pattern (including lower levels of awareness of the anthropogenic causes of climate change, lessened first-hand experiences of climate change impacts due to higher levels of regulating ecosystem services, and higher levels of resilience in rural areas related to a closer relationship with nature), and call for further research to investigate this.

KW - Climate change

KW - perception

KW - place attachment

KW - rural

KW - urban

KW - threat

U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0290354

DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0290354

M3 - Article

C2 - 37672550

VL - 18

JO - PLoS ONE

JF - PLoS ONE

SN - 1932-6203

IS - 9

M1 - e0290354

ER -