The research, published in the journal Discover Oceans, surveyed 113 randomly selected artisanal fishermen at three landing centers, Ruela, Chibuabuare and Chuiba, between September and November 2024. The team, led by Heráclito Comia of Lúrio University, used semi-structured questionnaires administered face to face in Portuguese and the local language Emakua, a necessity in a population where more than half of respondents had no formal schooling. The sample was drawn from 146 registered fishermen using systematic sampling with a random starting point, and the data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and chi-square tests. The survey deliberately anchored questions to the previous five years, a window that cognitive psychology research suggests minimizes recall bias while capturing meaningful trends, and one that includes the traumatic memory of Cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019.

The numbers tell a story of partial awareness. Just under 62 percent of respondents said they had heard of climate change, a figure well below the near-universal awareness reported among fishers in Ghana and Nigeria. But awareness of the label tells only part of the story. When asked about specific environmental changes, the fishermen’s empirical observations were strikingly sharp: 91 percent perceived rising temperatures, 82 percent noted declining rainfall, 86 percent perceived rising sea levels, and a remarkable 98 percent reported more frequent cyclones. One 52-year-old fisherman from Ruela described the shift in visceral terms, saying the sun is much hotter now than when he started fishing, and that by ten in the morning the heat burns their skin where once they could stay out until midday.

Attribution is where the scientific and traditional worlds diverge most sharply. Nearly three quarters of respondents, 72.6 percent, attributed the changes to supernatural or divine forces rather than human activity, and only 27.4 percent acknowledged potential human contributions. One 65-year-old fisherman from Chuiba explained that the changes in the sea and the winds are controlled by the spirits of the ancestors, and that when ceremonies are not performed correctly or the sea is angered, the weather turns against the community. The researchers argue this attribution pattern matters enormously for policy, because belief in human agency is often a precondition for proactive adaptation. If the weather is a moral response to human behavior, the logic of emissions reduction or coastal planning simply does not compute.

The statistical analysis added nuance to the picture. Education level was strongly associated with climate change awareness, with those holding primary education or higher significantly more likely to recognize the term than those with no formal schooling, a moderate effect size confirmed by chi-square testing. Years of fishing experience, meanwhile, predicted the adoption of adaptation strategies: fishers with more than two decades on the water were far more likely to deploy multiple responses, suggesting that accumulated local ecological knowledge is itself a form of adaptive capacity. Intriguingly, perception of warming did not vary by age group, indicating that the experience of a hotter coast is shared across generations, and awareness did not differ significantly between landing centers.

What the fishermen are actually doing in response to change is arguably the most encouraging part of the study. The most common strategy, adopted by 36 percent, was abandoning mosquito nets, a cheap but destructive fishing method, in favor of proper drift nets, a shift the fishers describe as both a reaction to declining catches and a conscious conservation choice. One 38-year-old from Chibuabuare explained that mosquito nets were cheap but the fish were disappearing, and that drift nets cost more but catch bigger fish while the small ones can grow. A quarter of respondents reported avoiding juvenile fish, and a fifth said they deliberately avoided expanding their fishing zones. One elder put the logic plainly: if you catch the babies today, there will be no food for the children tomorrow.

But the study also exposes the hard ceiling that poverty places on adaptation. Poverty was named as the primary barrier by 41.6 percent of respondents, followed by lack of access to financial resources at 20.4 percent. The dilemma is captured by a 29-year-old fisherman from Chuiba who said he knows he should buy a motor to reach deeper, cooler water, but struggles just to buy food for his family and cannot imagine saving for an engine. Other constraints included restricted access to fishing grounds during conservation closures, lack of appropriate gear, limited access to government services, and competition from foreign fishing vessels. In the IPCC’s vulnerability framework of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, the fishers of Pemba score high on the first two and dismally on the third.

The information landscape shaping these perceptions is equally revealing. Radio was the dominant source of climate information, cited by 41.6 percent of respondents, followed by fisher-to-fisher communication at 28.3 percent. Formal channels, NGOs, researchers and extension services, barely registered, each mentioned by fewer than one percent of respondents. That near-total absence of institutional contact represents a critical failure of the science-society interface, the authors argue, and simultaneously points to a solution: radio broadcasts in Emakua and Portuguese, paired with peer-to-peer education networks, could carry scientific climate information into communities through channels they already trust. The researchers also propose engaging fishers as citizen scientists to record environmental changes, co-producing knowledge that is both scientifically valid and locally credible.

The wider stakes are considerable. Mozambique’s coastal and marine environment supports roughly two million people who depend directly on fisheries, and the artisanal sub-sector accounts for about 80 percent of total marine catches. Climate projections suggest temperatures in the country could rise by 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, and the 2019 cyclone season, which killed more than 600 people and displaced millions, offered a brutal preview of what intensifying extremes mean for coastal communities. The Pemba study’s recommendations therefore extend beyond climate communication to structural change: alternative livelihood programs such as sustainable aquaculture and ecotourism, subsidies for sustainable fishing gear, microfinance access, SMS and radio early-warning systems, community climate information centers at landing sites, and social protection measures such as cash transfers during closed seasons or weather-indexed insurance.

What emerges from Pemba is a lesson that resonates far beyond northern Mozambique. Local communities living on the front lines of climate change often perceive its fingerprints with precision, sometimes more vividly than distant institutions, but perception alone does not produce effective adaptation when explanations are supernatural, information is informal and money is scarce. The researchers call for longitudinal studies tracking how perceptions evolve, comparative work across Mozambique’s coastlines, and gender-disaggregated analyses, since women dominate fish processing and marketing yet were largely absent from this survey of registered fishers. Until the structural constraints of poverty and the cultural framing of climate causation are addressed together, the fishermen of Pemba will keep reading the sea accurately, and keep waiting for the spirits to calm it.

Subject of Research: Climate change perceptions and adaptation among artisanal fishing communities in northern Mozambique

Article Title: Artisan fishers’ perception of climate change: a case study of Pemba district, Northern Mozambique

Article References: Comia, H., Achia, S., & Machaieie, S. (2026). Artisan fishers’ perception of climate change: a case study of Pemba district, Northern Mozambique. Discover Oceans, 3(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44289-026-00123-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44289-026-00123-7

Keywords: climate change perception, artisanal fisheries, Mozambique, Pemba, adaptation strategies, coastal communities, local ecological knowledge, climate communication, vulnerability, Indian Ocean cyclones, fisheries conservation, adaptive capacity

The CCPS was originally developed by Anne van Valkengoed, Linda Steg and Goda Perlaviciute for use in the United States and the Netherlands, and it assesses five distinct dimensions of climate change perception. The first is perceived reality, the degree to which a person accepts that climate change is actually happening. The second concerns perceived causes, capturing whether people attribute the phenomenon to human activity such as burning fossil fuels or to natural processes. The third is valence, the evaluation of whether the consequences of climate change are predominantly negative or, in a minority framing, potentially positive. The final two dimensions are spatial distancing, how geographically remote the consequences feel, and temporal distancing, how far into the future they seem to lie. Together these five factors map the cognitive architecture of how ordinary people mentally represent a global, slow-moving threat.

That architecture matters because decades of research link these perceptions to real-world outcomes. People who perceive climate change as real, human-caused and close at hand tend to report higher risk perception, stronger pro-environmental behavior and greater willingness to support mitigation and adaptation policies. Conversely, psychological distance, the sense that climate impacts belong to other places, other people or distant future generations, has long been suspected of dampening urgency, although recent work, including a 2023 analysis by van Valkengoed and colleagues in One Earth, argues that this distance effect has often been overestimated. Sorting out these competing claims requires measurement tools that behave consistently across populations, which is precisely the problem the Spanish team set out to solve.

The motivation for the new study was controversy. Since its introduction, the CCPS has attracted debate over its psychometric properties, the statistical criteria that determine whether a questionnaire actually measures what it claims to measure, reliably and with a stable structure. Calls have circulated in the literature for adaptations of the scale in diverse cultural contexts, and an Indonesian adaptation published in 2023 in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology was one earlier response. Spain, with its distinctive political landscape, high public exposure to climate impacts such as drought and heat waves, and an active environmental movement, offered an ideal test bed. If the five-factor structure survived translation and re-validation in a southern European sample, confidence in the scale’s universality would grow considerably.

The researchers recruited 825 Spanish adults with a mean age of 39.77 years and a standard deviation of 16.24, meaning the sample spanned young adults through older respondents. Participants completed the adapted CCPS along with a battery of established instruments, including measures of climate change anxiety, environmental attitudes based on the New Ecological Paradigm tradition, climate change risk perception, prior personal experience of climate change, and self-reported pro-environmental behaviors. The team then applied confirmatory factor analysis, a structural equation modeling technique that tests whether the pattern of correlations among questionnaire items matches a theoretically predicted factor structure. The original five-factor model showed an adequate fit to the Spanish data, meaning the same five dimensions emerged cleanly rather than collapsing into each other or fragmenting unpredictably.

Convergent validity, the degree to which scores on a new instrument correlate with related constructs in theoretically expected directions, was also confirmed. Spanish participants who scored higher on the CCPS dimensions reported significantly more climate change anxiety, more positive environmental attitudes, higher climate risk perception, more direct experience of climate impacts, and more frequent pro-environmental behaviors. This web of correlations is exactly what theory predicts: perception, emotion, cognition and action should travel together. The pattern also aligns with a broader international literature, including meta-analytic work by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues published in Nature Climate Change showing that beliefs about climate change are systematically linked to risk perception and policy support across dozens of countries.

The demographic comparisons revealed a familiar but nuanced social geography of belief. Participants who identified as left-wing scored significantly higher than right-wing participants across the CCPS dimensions, echoing a well-documented ideological divide in climate cognition that has been linked to free-market ideology and motivated reasoning. Environmental activists likewise scored significantly higher than non-activists, consistent with research showing that key climate beliefs are among the genesis points of activism. Age produced a more selective pattern: participants aged 18 to 35 scored higher than older respondents only on the perceived reality and temporal distancing factors, suggesting that younger Spaniards accept the phenomenon as real and feel its consequences as less remote in time, but do not necessarily differ on perceived causes, valence or spatial distance. Gender, notably, did not produce significant differences in this sample.

Perhaps the most technically demanding part of the study concerned measurement invariance, the statistical demonstration that a questionnaire functions the same way across different groups. Without invariance, a difference in average scores between, say, men and women could reflect a difference in how the items are understood rather than a genuine difference in perception. Using sequential tests of configural, metric and scalar invariance, the team established that the CCPS holds its meaning across genders, across levels of environmental activism, across age groups, and, strikingly, between the Spanish sample and the original United States samples. That cross-national invariance is a rare and valuable result, because it licenses direct comparisons of climate perception scores between the two countries rather than treating each adaptation as an isolated instrument.

Reliability results rounded out the picture. The scale showed high internal consistency, meaning items within each dimension correlate strongly with one another, and adequate temporal stability, assessed through test-retest procedures and quantified with intraclass correlation coefficients, meaning scores remain stable over time in the same individuals. The study was approved by the ethics committee of Universidad Pontificia Comillas, all participants gave informed consent, and the underlying data have been deposited openly on Figshare, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and reuse the results. The work was partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and by an internal research call at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, with the funders playing no role in study design, analysis or publication decisions.

For researchers and communicators, the practical upshot is substantial. Spain now has a validated, five-dimension instrument for measuring climate change perception in adults, one that is comparable across genders, generations, political identities and at least two continents. That opens the door to longitudinal studies tracking how Spanish perceptions shift as heat waves intensify and droughts lengthen, to evaluations of whether communication campaigns genuinely reduce psychological distance, and to cross-cultural analyses of why some societies mobilize faster than others. More broadly, the study is a reminder that the science of climate change depends not only on thermometers and ice cores but also on carefully validated questionnaires, because the gap between physical reality and public perception is where policy, behavior and, ultimately, emissions are decided.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Climate Change Perceptions Scale in the Spanish adult population

Article Title: Climate change perceptions scale: validation for the spanish population

Article References: Carballo-Losada, M., Collado, S., Caperos, J. M., & Rodríguez-Rey, R. (2026). Climate change perceptions scale: validation for the spanish population. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10114-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10114-8

Keywords: climate change perception, psychometrics, scale validation, environmental psychology, measurement invariance, psychological distance, climate anxiety, pro-environmental behavior, Spain, confirmatory factor analysis, risk perception, Current Psychology