How does private adaptation motivation to climate change vary across cultures? Evidence from a meta-analysis

Natural hazards, exacerbated by climate change, increasingly affect societies worldwide. The accelerating risks entail that private adaptation complement more traditional public climate change adaptation measures. Culture plays an important role in framing how individuals experience hazards and behave toward them. Yet, empirical research explicitly measuring whether and how climate change adaptation varies across cultures is lacking. To address this gap, we collect meta-analytic data on factors motivating individual flooding adaptation from 25 countries and more than 50 publications. Employing Hofstede's Cultural Rankings as a metric of national culture, we model the effect of culture on adaptation motivation of individual households using meta-regression analysis. We find a number of statistically significant relationships between culture and factors motivating private climate change adaptation. Hence, cultural context is vital to consider when designing and implementing climate change adaptation policies, simulating the uptake of individual hazard prevention measures, or integrating private adaptation in assessing costs of climate change in integrated assessment models. These findings are among the first to provide empirical evidence on the interaction effects between culture and private climate change adaptation motivation.