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Personal salience regarding extreme weather events may be crucial for recognising the profound effects of anthropogenic climate change. However, efforts to understand how individuals attribute extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change, and their implications for eco-anxiety, have not effectively integrated psychological perspectives. Following Hong Kong’s wettest storm on record in 2023, we recruited a cross-sectional sample of adults ( n = 376, ages 18–83) immediately after typhoon season onset (from 3 June to 11 September) in 2024. We aimed to examine (1) how extreme weather experiences and socio-demographic factors influence individuals’ subjective attribution of extreme weather to anthropogenic climate change, and (2) how extreme weather fear (i.e. storm fear), weather salience, uncertainty intolerance, anxiety control, nature connectedness, and future risk awareness of local climate disasters are associated with two distinct subdimensions of eco-anxiety, conceptualised as ‘habitual ecological worry’ and ‘negative consequences of eco-anxiety’, which may be associated respectively with adaptive and maladaptive responses to eco-anxiety. Our results suggest that only the personal salience of day-to-day local weather patterns significantly affected respondents’ subjective attribution of local weather patterns to anthropogenic climate impacts, rather than their extreme weather event experiences. Future risk awareness and nature connectedness were mainly associated with adaptive responses to eco-anxiety, while only storm fear was strongly associated with both adaptive and maladaptive responses. This finding underscores the dual effects of extreme weather fear, namely motivating action-oriented aspects of eco-anxiety and exacerbating functionally impairment of eco-anxiety. Promoting future risk awareness and increasing nature connectedness – independent of fear – could improve urbanised populations’ perceived efficacy in engaging in pro-climate actions.
Lau et al. (Thu,) studied this question.