Climate concern and policy acceptance before and after COVID-19
Drews, Stefan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Savin, Ivan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
van den Bergh, Jeroen C. J. M. (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Villamayor Tomás, Sergio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Date:	2022
Abstract:	It remains unclear how COVID-19 has affected public engagement with the climate crisis. According to the finite-pool-of-worry hypothesis, concern about climate change should have decreased after the pandemic, in turn reducing climate-policy acceptance. Here we test these and several other conjectures by using survey data from 1172 Spanish participants who responded before and after the first wave of COVID-19, allowing for both aggregate and within-person analyses. We find that on average climate concern has decreased, while acceptance of most climate policies has increased. At the individual-level, adverse health experiences are unrelated to these changes. The same holds for negative economic experiences, with the exception that unemployment is associated with reduced acceptance of some policies. Complementary to the finite-pool-of-worry test, we examine three additional pandemic-related issues. As we find, (1) higher climate concern and policy acceptance are associated with a belief that climate change contributed to the COVID-19 outbreak; (2) higher policy acceptance is associated with a positive opinion about how the government addressed the COVID-19 crisis; (3) citizens show favorable attitudes to a carbon tax with revenues used to compensate COVID-19-related expenditures. Overall, we conclude there is support for addressing the global climate crisis even during a global health crisis.
Grants:	European Commission 741087 European Commission 660089 Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad RyC-2017-22782 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CEX2019-000940-MEU
Note:	Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Climate change ; Climate policy ; Coronavirus ; Olicy support ; Panel study
Published in:	Ecological economics, Vol. 199 (September 2022) , art. 107507, ISSN 0921-8009

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107507
PMID: 35669404

16 p, 2.8 MB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) > Environmental and Climate Economics (ECE)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles