Bayesian analysis of climate change adaptation willingness of private forest owners in Canada

This repository implements a fully Bayesian analysis of an online survey designed to elicit information on climate change adaptation behaviours of private forest owners in Canada. The survey design is based on protection motivation theory in relation to climate change adaptation.

To explain motivations underlying the willingness to implement adaption actions in the future, we focused on the subset of respondents who stated that they owned at least one managed woodlot, had taken part in the decision-making of these woodlots, and intended to take part in the decision making in the future (507 of 611 respondents). Given the information density of the survey (close to 200 contrasts), the statistical analysis proceeds in three steps (1) preliminary variable selection for each adaptation action individually; (2) joint modelling of adaptation willingness across all adaptation actions simultaneously; (3) estimation of marginal effects based on the posterior predictive distribution of the joint model.

All raw data, as well as intermediate and final results are contained in the repository. Most scripts are designed to be used in a high performance computing setting. For detailed methods and references, as well as instructions for replication, please see the readme.pdf.