Abstract
Climate citizens' assembly, in which randomly selected citizens as a proxy for the relevant population attend and deliberate on a climate issue, has gained attention, recently. Although they were randomly selected from those who expressed an intention to participate, those who expressed an intention to participate in the first place are likely to be biased against the population. In this paper, the relationship between the attributes and attitudes of citizens toward global warming and their willing or unwilling to participate in local climate assembly was discussed through an online questionnaire survey in Japan. How differences in conferencing methods, such as in-person and online, affect willingness to participate was also examined. Willingness to participate is generally higher in the higher age category, more respondents answered “can not participate” rather than “do not want to participate” in younger age category. Willingness to participate is higher for in-person assembly than for online assembly, particularly in the higher age category mainly due to the unfamiliarity with online conferencing. Respondents were classified into four segments according to their awareness and attitude toward global warming, then willingness to participate was clearly different in each segment. However even in “skeptics” group, there was a certain number of respondents who expressed their willing to participate in the assembly.
