Public risk perceptions and responses to climate change

Louisa Kiely September 3, 2012
A recently published joint study of Australian and British perceptions and feelings on climate change is very interesting.

Here are the main three – although please read the whole study in the link below.

  • Despite dramatic differences in geographic regions, climate, climate change exposure, and recent histories of extreme weather events, the findings from Australia and Great Britain across most risk perception, belief, and concern domains were remarkably similar.
  • Belief and acceptance of climate change among respondents was very high, with this acceptance including acknowledgment of some level of human causality for the vast majority of respondents.
  • Public concern levels with respect to the threat and perceived impacts of climate change were also very high.

You know what the great thing about this is – not that we have a problem (which was so preventable if we’d just lived within the planets means), but that if we can find the will there is still a great solution.

And it’s right beneath our feet – our soils. 

  • We have these huge soil crisis, 
  • We know that we have a huge deficit of carbon in the soils, 
  • We know we can take CO2 out of the air and store the carbon in the soils, 
  • We know as we build carbon in the soils we build resilience to climate change and better soils, 
  • We know we need to give people hope that they can be part of a solution. 

This win/win/win is why we support the soil carbon solution so strongly. Sure, we need to plant more trees, but the soil is a much bigger sink than even the above ground vegetation (and you can’t eat trees) 

However, we are not putting the soils, or even other solutions, on the urgency list – in effect disempowering people to make the choices we need to solve the issue.

For all these reasons we will continue to argue that we need a soil carbon methodology very soon. Let us not make predictions about how little ours soils could do; let’s resolve to find out how much they could do if we felt that it was imperative to do so. Its a whole different paradigm. We have a big problem we need a big sink – and its right beneath our feet! Lets get going.

Allow everyone to be free to help farmers do the job to save our soils, and help save the planet. 

Click here to read more.