Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Many quantitative studies on climate change remain attitude/concern oriented, disregarding the impact of concrete actions. Given there are often gaps between attitudes and behaviours in such a critical issue as climate change, closing the gap between the two requires more consistent and realistic actions against it. Exploring the level of gap helps both to call for public attention and provide guiding results for the government policies. In this article, comparing four different European countries, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, I examine both attitude and behavior of climate change, based on the data provided by the European Social Survey, Round 8 (2016). The main questions of this study are: 1) How is the correlation between attitudes and behaviors of climate change? 2) Do the demographic, class, cultural and political indicators relate to these? 3) How do these indicators affect attitudes and behaviors? 4) What factors can explain the possible differences between countries/regions?