Opinion leaders and complex sustainability issues: fostering response capacity to climate change

Background: Making meaningful links between the global and local scales is an enduring challenge for behavioural change studies focused on sustainability. For example, the impacts of climate change are expected to affect all sectors of society across scales; however, the extent of current engagement with responding to the risks associated with climate change is limited. It is therefore prudent to look beyond the sites of current political response to climate change to the informal sector where collective action is commonly mobilized to achieve other social objectives, to look for points of potential intersection with the aims of mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Aims: My research contributes to the emergent field of response capacity to climate change by analysing the potential of opinion leaders at the local level to foster broader engagement with responding to climate change. It does this by (1) identifying a group of individuals who occupy positions of influence within their fields of social commitment in the Sunshine Coast region; (2) analysing the reported strategies they employ to influence the objectives they are committed to; and (3) analysing their views about climate change in terms of the rhetorical positions assumed. Methods: The value of analysing attitudes through a rhetorical framework is that the tenuous nature of attitudes to climate change and the effect of context on how such positions can be interpreted become apparent. Community opinion leaders’ evaluations of the seriousness of climate change risk for their areas of community influence also indicate the nature of information that is lacking in the public debate about responding to climate change. Research findings: The findings of this analysis highlight the need to develop targeted information that would allow community opinion leaders to assess the risks from climate change in their sectors and to determine responses that support their community objectives