Disaster preparedness and community helping behaviour in the wake of the 2020 Oregon wildfires.

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity owing to climate change. Individual-level behavioural responses-notably, disaster preparedness and community helping actions (such as donating and volunteering)-supplement government efforts to respond to such phenomena, but rarely have they been explored together. Using data from a survey administered soon after the 2020 Oregon wildfires, this paper compares a range of socio-demographic, experiential, attitudinal, and communication-related factors associated with these two individual-level behavioural responses. Findings indicate that respondents who reported experiencing a higher degree of harm and heightened concern about climate change after the wildfires were more likely to report disaster preparedness and community helping actions. Those who reported more frequent informal discussions about the wildfires, consulting more sources to seek information on them, and higher percentages of friends, neighbours, and community members taking actions to prepare for future wildfires also reported more disaster preparedness and community helping actions. Disaster preparedness actions were also positively associated with seeking information from formal/official sources.

Food Practice Lifestyles: Identification and Implications for Energy Sustainability.

Food systems, including production, acquisition, preparation, and consumption, feature importantly in environmental sustainability, energy consumption and climate change. With predicted increases in food and water shortages associated with climate change, food-related lifestyle and behavioral changes are advocated as important mitigation and adaptation measures. Yet, reducing emissions from food systems is predicted to be one of our greatest challenges now and in the future. Traditional theories of environmental behavioral change often assume that individuals make "reasoned choices" that incorporate cost-benefit assessment, moral and normative concerns and affect/symbolic motives, yielding behavioral interventions that are often designed as informational or structural strategies. In contrast, some researchers recommend moving toward an approach that systematically examines the temporal organization of society with an eye toward understanding the patterns of social practices to better understand behaviors and develop more targeted and effective interventions. Our study follows on these recommendations with a study of food consumption "lifestyles" in the United States, using extant time use diary data from a nationally representative sample of Americans (n = 16,100) from 2014 to 2016. We use cluster analysis to identify unique groups based on temporal and locational eating patterns. We find evidence of six respondent clusters with distinct patterns of food consumption based on timing and location of eating, as well as individual and household characteristics. Factors associated with cluster membership include age, employment status, and marital status. We note the close connections between age and behaviors, suggesting that a life course scholarship approach may add valuable insight. Based on our findings, we identify opportunities for promoting sustainable energy use in the context of the transition to renewables, such as targeting energy-shifting and efficiency-improvement interventions based on group membership.

Global changes in electricity consumption during COVID-19.

Understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic has altered electricity consumption can provide insights into society's responses to future shocks and other extreme events. We quantify changes in electricity consumption in 58 different countries/regions around the world from January-October 2020 and examine how those changes relate to government restrictions, health outcomes, GDP, mobility metrics, and electricity sector characteristics in different countries. We cluster the timeseries of electricity consumption changes to identify impact groupings that capture systematic differences in timing, depth of initial changes, and recovery rate, revealing substantial heterogeneity. Results show that stricter government restrictions and larger decreases in mobility (particularly retail and recreation) are most tightly linked to decreases in electricity consumption, although these relationships are strongest during the initial phase of the pandemic. We find indications that decreases in electricity consumption relate to pre-pandemic sensitivity to holidays, suggesting a new direction for future research.

Local adaptation policy responses to extreme weather events.

At a global level, climate change is expected to result in more frequent and higher-intensity weather events, with impacts ranging from inconvenient to catastrophic. The potential for disasters to act as "focusing events" for policy change, including adaptation to climate change risk, is well known. Moreover, local action is an important element of climate change adaptation and related risk management efforts. As such, there is a good reason to expect local communities to mobilize in response to disaster events, both with immediate response and recovery-focused activities, as well as longer-term preparedness and adaptation-focused public policy changes. However, scholars also note that the experience of disaster does not always yield policy change; indeed, disasters can also result in policy inertia and failure, perhaps as often or more often than major policy change. This study poses two key research questions. First, we ask to what degree policy change occurs in communities impacted by an extreme weather event. Second, we seek to understand the conditions that lead to adaptation-oriented policy adoption in response to an extreme weather event. Our results suggest two main recipes for future-oriented policy adoption in the wake of an extreme weather event. For both recipes, a high-impact event is a necessary condition for future-oriented policy adoption. In the first recipe for change, policy adoption occurs in Democratic communities with highly focused media attention. The second, less expected recipe for change involves Republican communities that have experienced other uncommon weather events in the recent past. We use a comparative case approach with 15 cases and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis methods. Our approach adds to the existing literature on policy change and local adaptation by selecting a mid-N range of cases where extreme weather events have the potential to act as focusing events, thereby sidestepping selection on the dependent variable. Our approach also takes advantage of a novel method for measuring attention, the latent Dirichlet allocation approach.

The Effect of Geographic Proximity to Unconventional Oil and Gas Development on Public Support for Hydraulic Fracturing.

With the rapid growth of unconventional oil and natural gas development transforming the U.S. economic and physical landscape, social scientists have increasingly explored the spatial dynamics of public support for this issue-that is, whether people closer to unconventional oil and gas development are more supportive or more opposed. While theoretical frameworks like construal-level theory and the "Not in My Backyard" (or NIMBY) moniker provide insight into these spatial dynamics, case studies in specific locations experiencing energy development reveal substantial variation in community responses. Larger-scale studies exploring the link between proximity and support have been hampered by data quality and availability. We draw on a unique data set that includes geo-coded data from national surveys (nine waves; n = 19,098) and high-resolution well location data to explore the relationship between proximity and both familiarity with and support for hydraulic fracturing. We use two different measures of proximity-respondent distance to the nearest well and the density of wells within a certain radius of the respondent's location. We find that both types of proximity to new development are linked to more familiarity with hydraulic fracturing, even after controlling for various individual and contextual factors, but only distance-based proximity is linked to more support for the practice. When significant, these relationships are similar to or exceed the effects of race, income, gender, and age. We discuss the implications of these findings for effective risk communication as well as the importance of incorporating spatial analysis into public opinion research on perceptions of energy development.