Perceptions of Weather Risks and Climate Beliefs Among the Hong Kong General Public

The University of Hong Kong (HKU)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Weather Risk Perception

Treatments: Behavioral: Heat risk and pro-environment behavior message

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04919148

UW 19-093

Details and patient eligibility

About

Background: Local abnormal heat events may be used as proxies for communicating the health impacts of climate change when people physically feel the effects to reduce the psychological distance of climate change and improve public engagement with climate and weather risk. However, there are concerns that this strategy may be more effective for climate believers, and that it may somewhat compromise the scientific precision because it may lead to erroneous beliefs that climate change is merely characterized by temperature rises or extreme heat but ignore other extreme weather events such as flood and extreme cold, and that cold spells are interpreted as evidence of no climate change. None of these potential effects and concerns has been tested.

Aims: This proposed study is aimed to explore patterns of climate beliefs and their influences on perceptions of heat-related risks and responses to heat health warnings in the general public of Hong Kong; (2) Test the preliminary effects of a revised heat health warning (RHHW) that incorporates information about the health impacts of climate change into existing heat health warning on perceived heat-related risk and climate beliefs.

Design and subjects: This will be a mix-methods study comprising in-depth qualitative interviews, a population-based cohort survey and a pilot randomized control trial (RCT). Subjects will be the general Hong Kong Chinese adults aged ≥18 years.

Main outcome measures: Latent class analysis will be conducted to examine patterns of climate beliefs while structural equation modelling to test the relationships among climate beliefs, perceived heat-related risks and behavioural responses to heat warnings. Qualitative data will be analysed using thematic content analysis while the effect of RHHW will be tested using t-test and linear regression models.

Enrollment: 429 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Participants should own a mobile phone and be able to read Chinese.

Exclusion criteria

• Participants with no mobile phone or cannot understand Chinese will be excluded.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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429 participants in 2 patient groups

Participants receive control message

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants only receive standard heat risk warning

Participants receive intervention message

Experimental group

Description:

Participants receive standard heat risk warning plus figures incorporating the health impacts of heat and pro-environment behaviors.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Heat risk and pro-environment behavior message