Dr. Midori Aoyagi: Climate change risk perception in Asia

Dr. Midori Aoyagi from National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan gave a talk titled "Climate change risk perception in Asia - from the survey results of Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Japan".

Abstract:
Recent extreme weather all over the world effect on people's everyday lives and also on the perception of climate change. We are currently working on the project about people's lifestyles and sustainability in Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar. In interviewing people about everyday lives, we realized that people often mentioned the recent extreme weather, such as flood, or Typhoon, especially in southern Vietnam. People often connected natural disasters or other accidents with climate change. Sometimes they said, "I watched it on the television."

Most stories are about "adaptation" aspects of climate change. People hardly referred to the so-called "mitigation" aspects of the climate change, such as saving energy. In those regions, income restriction limited household energy consumption. People have to save energy for the sake of saving own money.

In this paper, we report the public perception of climate change in Southeast Asian countries, and Japan and their understandings of climate risk.

The seminar was arranged in cooperation with CET (Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation).