Public Knowledge, Concern and Engagement of Climate Change in Cambodia-A Perspective of Residents in Phnom Penh

Abstract

This paper explored the public knowledge, concern and engagement (KCE) of climate change (CC) in Cambodia. The study used a survey questionnaire to collect the data from public respondents through online and face-to-face distribution. There were 468 respondents fully completed the questionnaire in which 196 were completed via online and 272 filled in paper-based questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by using SPSS and the structural topic modeling (STM) was used. The result indicated that the participants had high knowledge about CC; they believed human activities are the main cause of the CC. Almost 60% revealed that CC brings both positive and negative effects to the earth. More interestingly, the major concerns of respondents were the excessive temperature and the change of rainfall pattern. In addition, the participants believed the government plays the leading role in response to CC in Cambodia. More than 40% agreed that fiscal and taxation policies can perform a positive role in dealing with CC. Last, but not least, almost 60% thought personal behavior is important to respond to CC and nearly 64% of respondents is willing to make their contribution to cope with CC. Further analysis showed that only gender, education level and occupation of respondents were significantly associated with their knowledge about CC. Thus, these factors affect the degree of participants’ understanding about CC.

Keywords: Knowledge, Concern, Engagement, Climate Change, Cambodia