What Does the General Public Think?

One way to determine the level of threat is to ask a representative sample in a survey.

According to a Gallup poll conducted in January 2010, 40 percent of Icelanders are gravely concerned about climate change, one-third is neutral toward the issue and 27 percent are not worried. Women are more concerned than men and older people are more concerned than younger people²⁰. Political views also seem to influence how people answered; 61 percent of those supporting the Left Greens fell into the “gravely concerned” group, as did 51 percent of Social Democrats, 33 percent of those voting for the Progressive Party and only 27 percent of those supporting the Independent Party. This result mirrors studies from other regions of the world, showing a tendency for women to be more concerned than men, and those tilted to the political left to be more concerned than those on the right. McCright and Dunlap (2011) found, for example, that conservative, white males are significantly more likely than other Americans to be climate-change deniers, meaning they either do not believe climate change is taking place or are skeptical that there can be a link between human action and climate changes.

Respondents to the 2010 Icelandic Gallup survey were asked if believed that climate change was already seriously impacting their local environment. Respondents who described themselves as gravely concerned about climate change were slightly more likely than other Icelanders to agree that their lives were already seriously impacted;

with 6 percent answered “strongly agree” and 30 percent answered “somewhat agree”) (Capacent Gallup, 2010).

In other words, the survey responses suggests that more than one-third of the population is gravely concerned about climate change and believes that climate change is already having a local impact. Nevertheless, identifying exactly how those changes will impact socioeconomic factors seems to be a difficult task. This also complicates an evaluation of the risks and the ability to discover if specific groups or communi-ties are being threatened, making the issue distant and abstract in people’s mind.

Additionally, because climate change is often referred to as global warming (which is only one component of the larger and more complex issue of climate change), some people may even see it as something positive, hoping for warmer weather and more sunny days. This was, at least, a common view among the policy shapers, when asked about how they felt the general public perceived climate change. A male civil

20 At first glance, this information seems to be in opposition to the discussion in the previous section about younger people being more likely to feel personal fear related to climate change. Yet, this need not be a contradiction. All of the policy shapers interviewed did express grave concern about climate change.

Their concern did not necessarily translate into a personal fear about how it could negatively influence their own lives, however, mainly because they believed that the most serious changes would not happen for a few decades.

servant, heavily involved in climate negotiations, does not sense much concern from the public:

I think most people do not see climate change as a threat. Rather, they are happy about a milder climate. Perhaps they complain that they can’t go skiing as often in the Reykjavik area. Something like that. I do think some will feel a loss when the glaciers start to disappear. But overall, I don’t think Icelanders see climate change as a threat. For instance, the discourse about the Arctic has been the other way around…that climate change will create opportunities, new sailing routes, and Iceland will be more strategically located.

A female politician expresses a similar view:

These are not changes that Icelanders believe are bad. Some people just joke that it is good to get better weather. But some people are worried about the extremes in the weather. Strange weather in November and so on. It makes people wonder, and perhaps get a little scared. I feel this more with the older generation that remembers further back.

Some of those interviewed believe this lack of interest is related to denial rather than ignorance. A female civil servant stated: “My feeling is that the Icelandic public is rather behind and thinks climate change is not a real threat. It is also a challenge to reach through, because it is uncomfortable to face the facts.”

This lack of interest can be seen in policy making at the local level. In spite of the fact that (according to the Gallup poll) more than one-third of the population claims to be gravely concerned about climate change and believes that the changes are already impacting the local environment, there is little pressure from the general public on municipalities or the national government to form an adaptation policy stating how authorities plan to respond to those changes.

As discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, climate change has generally been framed as a global issue. This could also explain why the public is not putting pressure on au-thorities to respond to climate change. At the local level, the impact of climate change is often only one component of many interacting factors that contributes to vulnerability and the capacity of a community to adapt to change. Thus, local adaption to climate change might not even have been identified as such in a separate climate policy, but might rather have been integrated into such other policies as urban planning, health policies or local economic development plans.

Because of this complexity, it is difficult to trace where concern for climate change is influencing public decision making at the local level, at least with respect to the adapta-tion side. As discussed further in the next chapter, Reykjavík (the capital area) is the

only municipality in Iceland that has adopted a special climate policy (although some others address climate change in Local Agenda 21 documents). Even the Reykjavík policy, however, is focused primarily on global responsibility to mitigate emissions locally, and there is no mention of local adaptation in the policy or associated docu-ments (Reykjavíkurborg, 2009).

6.4 Concluding Remarks

In summary, although both experts and a large proportion of the population perceive climate change as a threat, the securitization of climate change seems to come from

“above” rather than originating in local communities at the grassroots level. The se-curitization of climate change at the international level has influenced how climate change is presented in domestic policy documents in Iceland. This has happened in spite of the fact that scant information exists about the socioeconomic impact of cli-mate change and threats to national security, and human security threats at the local level are poorly defined.

The data collected from policy shapers through interviews and speeches reveals that some of them have felt a certain pressure to remain silent on issues related to climate change, or at least not to be too outspoken. Too much emphasis on the dangers as-sociated with climate change has sometimes lead to harsh criticism or resulted in an experience whereby the individuals involved felt they were ignored or sidelined in public discussion. This tendency to silence or sideline voices emphasizing climate-related threats has decreased as new information have been brought into the discussion and the scientific consensus on climate change has grown stronger.

When climate change is discussed as a threat in policy documents, the president’s speeches, and in interviews with policy shapers, the topic is most often approached from the perspective of security as a broad concept and the threats discussed are focused on human insecurities rather than military security. In other words, the environmental security discourse that MacGregor (2010) identifies as one of two dominant masculine discourses in climate politics (see Section 2.5) is not very evident in political discourses about climate change threats in Iceland. MacGregor describes this discourse as one that stresses the danger of climate change resulting in conflicts over scarce resources between and within states, calling for militaristic solutions. This, she argues, harmonizes with traditional ideas about hegemonic masculinity. Whereas the danger of resource conflicts is mentioned in policy documents, and did arise occasionally in interviews with policy shapers, it is not a major theme, and other dangers were given more attention. Iceland, as a state without an army, consistently rejects military solutions to deal with tensions at the international level. In fact, in their comparative study on the Arctic strategies of the eight Arctic states, Bailes & Heininen (2012) specifically draw attention to how

the Icelandic strategy is the most explicit of all in warning against militarization of the Arctic region. The emphasis is on comprehensive security, as is the case with Finland and Sweden, whereas the five littoral states of the Arctic Ocean (Canada, The Kingdom of Denmark, Norway, Russia and the USA) put greater emphasis on state sovereignty and defense (Bailes & Heininen, 2012).

Although adaptation is crucial in dealing with the consequences of climate change, addressing the root causes is necessary for long-term environmental security. This means focusing on mitigation and finding ways to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. This is in line with Barnett’s definition of environmental security, discussed in Chapter 2 (Section 2.2) which refers to the process of peacefully reducing human vulnerability to human-induced environmental degradation by addressing the root causes of this degradation and the associated human insecurity (Barnett, 2001). Yet, it is exactly this task that seems so difficult to accomplish. In spite of our knowledge about the relationship between human activities and climate change, and the explicitly stated goals of most states of the world that they will attempt to reduce emissions, the trend keeps moving the opposite direction. The desire for short-term economic gains outweighs the need to pay attention to the more long-term environmental security.

The fact that emission reduction by a few people does not enhance environmental security unless others follow in their footsteps further complicates the situation. The temptation to act as a free rider is great, and global climate change is a prime example of the “Tragedy of the Commons” phenomena described by Garreth Harding in his famous 1968 article in Science.²¹

Because of the nature of climate change as a problem related to an overuse of a global common (the atmosphere), incentives to reduce emissions need to be coordinated and managed from “above”, which entails that states of the world need to negotiate at the international level and then form and implement policies domestically to follow up on international agreements. As the history of the UNFCCC and the associated Kyoto Protocol has shown, this is a challenging task. Not only is it difficult to reach an agreement at the international level, but individual states are also finding it difficult to implement policies that result in real emissions reductions in line with their inter-national commitments. A close look at the formation and implementation of climate policy in one small state, again the site of the case study, Iceland, could reveal some of the obstacles that stand in the way.

21 Harding (1968) used the example of cattles on pasture land to explain the problems associated with utilization of open-access resources. If the land is unmanaged and herders can freely graze as many cattles as they like, there is great danger that the land will be overexploited. If ownership is not clear, individual herders have no interest in reducing the number of their own cattle, as their sacrifice would be of no use if someone else adds their cattle instead.