Risk Perception of Political Leadership toward Climate Change Risk: Applied with the Theory of Planned Behavior

As the whole world has faced unprecedented crises including the current COVID-19 crisis, mitigation of climate change risk has been strongly urged. A global community has failed to make distinctive progress to establish a global collective action to mitigate climate change risk. Reflected in the Paris Agreement, a voluntary agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), political leadership plays a central role in policy designs, adoptions, and implementations. This research aims to investigate dynamics of institutional factors that affect political leadership’s risk perception and concrete policy action for climate change risk. This research addresses the following question: To what extent do institutional factors play a critical role in shaping the risk perception of political leadership, in turn, to drive policy adoption? The risk perception of political leadership toward climate change is substantially influenced by international political norms, national industrial interests, and citizens’ opinions for climate change risk. I have developed a complex dynamic simulation model to analyze individual and interactive effects of these multiple institutional factors on the risk perception and policy behavior of political leadership. This understanding ultimately provides the practical policy guidance of how to promote the political leadership to take proactive policy actions for the future.