Understanding the role of hope in climate change risk perception: a cross-sectional study

Italy is experiencing the negative effects of climate change, which is causing considerable damage. Evidence of the damage is increasing citizens’ concern about climate change. According to many researchers, investigating the factors that drive and shape risk perception of climate change is of paramount importance to predicting public willingness to help combat it. Recently, the Climate Change Risk Perception model (CCRPM) was validated, showing its efficacy. However, the CCRPM does not consider some psychological variables related to people’s confidence that climate change can be mitigated. The purpose of the present study is to replicate CCRPM in the Italian context and to shed light on whether the addition of the Climate Change Hope variable can improve the explanatory power of this model. Results indicate that the CCRPM explains 49% of the variance of climate change risk perception and the addition of Climate Change Hope improves the model. Knowledge of impacts of climate change, social norms, value orientations, affect, and personal experience with extreme weather events were all identified as significant predictors. Affective and social norms factors explained significantly more variance in risk perception than other variables. These results suggest that climate change risk perception is a complex and multidimensional construct and that risk communicators should take an integrative approach by stimulating citizens’ affective and experiential processing mechanisms.