Location
Remote
Candidate
Athira Satheesh Kumar | Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo
Title
Examining Social and Climate Feedbacks: Linking Climate Opinions and Climate System in Social Networks
Abstract
Climate change is one of the most critical challenges that humanity faces, particularly due to its impacts on ecosystems, economies, and societies around the globe. Usually, climate models focus on physical and economic factors, often overlooking social dynamics. Despite identifying human contribution to the climate crisis, behavioral factors, such as public opinion and decisions about mitigation, remain unintegrated in climate models. This research highlights the role of human actions in addressing climate challenges and offers actionable pathways for mitigating the impacts of climate change. Human actions are controlled by social factors such as climate rumors. The rising popularity of social media exposes people to unverified information about climate change and its impacts. In addition to rumors, other factors, such as the high costs to switch to climate-friendly alternatives make mitigation less appealing to people. Although several models consider integrating social behaviour into climate models, these models usually treat human behaviour as a binary choice between mitigation and non-mitigation. However, choices are not too simple when it comes to climate change. People can have more or less intense climate opinions, demonstrating the importance of having a continuous range of opinions when it comes to understanding the issue of climate change. We adopt various modelling approaches to identify the factors leading to reduced response towards the issue of climate change. Our analysis reveals the important role larger groups play in determining future climate scenarios. The behaviour (mitigating or non-mitigating) of these large groups determines the overall emission levels of the population. We identified the importance of mitigation strategies to achieve our current climate targets. Moreover, frequent rumors regarding climate change can also enhance mitigative behaviour and reduce emissions. Factors such as frequent and unexpected social or climate events, stubbornness in individuals, opinion polarization, and high mitigation costs can greatly influence future climate predictions. Ignorance towards climate issues due to delayed response in switching to climate-friendly alternatives or completely forgetting about these issues are some of the major reasons for falling behind in meeting the world's climate targets. The global nature of climate issues makes finding common ground to adopt mitigative strategies difficult. This thesis underscores incorporating social dynamics into climate models, a more comprehensive framework for predicting policy outcomes. Policymakers could leverage the model outcomes to identify factors that minimize emissions by maximizing public response to climate change. Ultimately, this research emphasizes the necessity of integrating behavioral insights into climate models to support informed, and effective climate policy development.
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