Americans’ Support for Adaptation Policies on Natural Disasters of Wildfires and Floods -Surprise After Surprise

Abstract According to many natural scientists, global warming has worsened wildfires and floods in the United States, causing increasingly devastating damage, and will do so in the future. Whether government takes action to better mitigate the risks and costs of these natural disasters may depend on public opinion. This study explored Americans’ preferences for policies to prevent and cope with such damage and the factors influencing these preferences. A telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of American adults in August 2020 showed that majorities, and sometimes huge majorities, favored a variety of specific policies to protect people from damage, most of which are not being implemented well currently. As expected, policy support was driven more by sociotropic reasoning than by self-interest but surprisingly was not smaller among racial minorities or lower income individuals, refuting Maslow’s hierarchical of need theory and the notion of a “finite pool of worry.” Challenging theories of issue framing and demonstrating the robustness of opinions on this issue, an experiment showed that policy support was not altered when increasing future damage from wildfires and floods were attributed to global warming. Americans overwhelmingly favored federal government involvement in prevention and coping but preferred that the costs be borne mostly by people in fire- and flood-prone areas. This evidence sends surprisingly strong signals to lawmakers about public preferences and highlights their contours and determinants, thus contributing to the development of theories of public opinion.