Social cognition of climate change in coastal community: A case study in Xiamen City, China

Abstract Climate change has caused a series of social, economic and environmental consequences both at global and regional scales, especially for the urbanized coastal areas in China. Sea level rise and extreme weather threaten human and property safety, as well as sustainable development in China's densely populated coastal areas; all those factors bring new challenges to costal management. This paper takes a typical coastal city, Xiamen City as a case to study the residents' cognition of climate change, and based on questionnaire survey in coastal communities to explore the strategy development dealing with the climate change under integrated coastal management (ICM) framework. The social cognition survey includes three aspects: knowledge of the climate change, perception of the impact of climate change and response to the climate change. The results showed that the resident's knowledge on climate change and its risk was still at a relatively low level on average. Among effects of climate change, temperature rise can be easily identified by people, while sea level rise is less known by residents. Facing climate change, if residents have plans reactively, we think their attitudes are positive, i.e. evacuation is seen as negative. It is delight that 69.6% residents' attitude to adapt climate change is positive. 42.0% of residents prefer protective measures rather than adjustment measures when facing climate change. Furthermore, we explored the primary factors that influence residents' cognition and selection preference on adapting measures through logistic regression. Our study suggests that public cognition significantly affect public participation on climate change and the community-based planning and management on climate change is urgently in need in the rapidly developing urbanization coastal areas, which will play an important role in integrated coastal management.