The Politics of Climate Change Adaptation

According to Stefan Wray, a local activist from Austin, Texas: “Climate adaptation strategies largely leave partisan politics to one side of the discussion… people recognize that something is changing.” I test this assertion about the role of partisanship in climate change adaptation policy adoption and public opinion. I use data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to assess public support for climate adaptation policies and test the effect of framing environmental policies as responses to climate change. I find that a majority of survey respondents support climate change adaptation policies. I also find that support for environmental policies is reduced by the framing of these policies as responses to climate change and that these framing effects are conditional on party identification. Using panel data, I test the comparative influence of political factors, vulnerability to climate impacts, and vertical and horizontal policy diffusion on state and local adaptation policy adoption. I find that local adaptation policy adoption is influenced by vulnerability to climate impacts and by adaptation policy adoption in neighboring jurisdictions. At the state level, I find that political factors influence state adaptation policy adoption and that states are influenced by the adaptation policy adoption of neighboring states. These results provide new insight into the effects of partisanship, vulnerability, and policy diffusion on state and local adaptation policy adoption. They also provide additional evidence of the influence of competitive framing behavior in environmental policy.