Weathering the storm: Does reminding people of a natural disaster drive support for climate mitigation?

Public support for climate action is essential for advancing climate mitigation efforts. However, despite increasing awareness of the urgency of climate change, support for mitigation actions remains relatively low. Therefore, identifying effective ways to enhance public support for climate actions is a key objective for social science research. Our study aims to contribute to this understanding by investigating whether reminding people of natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly frequent, influences people's willingness to make sacrifices to mitigate climate change. We analyse two survey experiments carried out in the Italian context, testing the effect of priming respondents with two distinct natural disasters – glacier collapse and floods – on the willingness to accept limitations to the standard of living to mitigate climate change. We find that such priming can impact people's willingness to accept sacrifices to mitigate climate change. However, we find that this effect is present when the collapse of glaciers is mentioned, but not when floods are mentioned. We also find support for the attitudinal updating mechanism: the reminder of a glacier collapse enhances the willingness to accept sacrifices to mitigate climate change, especially among people not believing in the anthropogenic causes of climate change, as well as right-wing individuals.