TOWARDS CLIMATE JUSTICE: EXAMINING CONCERN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE IN DEVELOPED, TRANSITIONING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
By
Katrina Running
______
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2013
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Katrina Running, titled Towards Climate Justice: Examining Concern for Climate Change in Developed, Transitioning and Developing Countries and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
______Date: (May 22, 2013) Lane Kenworthy
______Date: (May 22, 2013) Don Grant
______Date: (May 22, 2013) Robin Stryker
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
______Date: (May 22, 2013) Dissertation Director: Lane Kenworthy
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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED: Katrina Running
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my friends, family and committee members for their intellectual and moral support, especially Chris Zarzana, for cooking many meals to sustain me while writing, and Sophie Zarzana, for frequently wandering through my office to meow-shout encouragements.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………7
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………...……………………9
LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………………………..14
PRESENT STUDY………………………………………………………………………29
REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………..…33
APPENDIX A: EXAMINING ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN IN DEVELOPED, TRANSITIONING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..41
Introduction………………………………………………………………………42
Theory and Hypotheses………………………………………………………..…45
Data and Methods………………………………………………………………..48
Results…………………………………………………………………………....55
Discussion………………………………………………………………………..61
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….67
References………………………………………………………………….…….70
List of Figures and Tables…….……………………………...………………….74
APPENDIX B: WORLD CITIZENSHIP AND CONCERN FOR GLOBAL WARMING: BUILDING THE CASE FOR A STRONG INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY
Abstract……………………………………..……………………………………98
Introduction………………………………..…………………………….……….99
Theoretical Argument……………………….…………………………….……103
Data and Methods………………………………………………………………111
Results………………………………………………………………………..…117
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TABLE OF CONTENTS—continued
Discussion and Conclusions……………………………………………………119
References………………………………………………………………………125
List of Figures and Tables….…………………………………………………..131
APPENDIX C: TOWARDS CLIMATE JUSTICE: HOW DO THE MOST VULNERABLE WEIGH ENVIRONMENT-ECONOMY TRADE-OFFS?
Abstract………………………………………………………...……………….136
Introduction………………………………………………..……………………137
Literature Review……………………………………………………………….141
Data and Measures……………………………………………………………...147
Results…………………………………………………………………………..155
Discussion………………………………………………………………………159
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...…163
References………………………………………………………………………166
List of Figures and Tables……………………………….…………………..…173
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation is a comparative international study of attitudes towards climate change.
Using multilevel models, individual level data from the 2005-2008 wave of the World
Values Survey, and country level data from the 2010 Climate Risk Index and the World
Bank, this research identifies the factors associated with concern for global warming and support for various environmental policies and behaviors in economically developed, transitioning, and developing countries. The first paper addresses an ongoing debate in environmental sociology about the extent to which concern for environmental problems is a result of the objective deterioration of environmental conditions or subjective values among environmentally-oriented individuals. Findings indicate that a country’s recent experience with climate-related environmental disasters has little to no effect on concern for global warming. Some support is found for the subjective values explanation, especially in countries at the most advanced stage of economic development. The second paper frames climate change as an asymmetrical social dilemma and tests whether four distinct citizenship identities are associated with the odds an individual considers global warming a very serious problem. This study finds that identifying as world citizens and autonomous individuals increases the odds an individual judges global warming very serious, while identifying as national citizens or local community members has no relationship with evaluations of global warming. The third paper examines the impact of numerous measures of security/vulnerability on individual willingness to make environment-economy trade-offs. The data reveal that higher household incomes, residing in a country with higher per capita GDP, and higher rates of adult literacy are
8 positively associated with prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth.
However, residents of economically developing countries (or countries designated Non-
Annex I by the Kyoto Protocol) are also much more likely to express willingness to donate personal income for the protection of the environment compared to residents of developed (Annex I) countries. The findings from these three studies have implications for sociological research on the relationship between economic inequality and environmental attitudes, the conditions under which international cooperation on climate is more or less likely, and the quest for climate justice.
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INTRODUCTION
Climate change and inequality are complex, interrelated problems that will affect the human experience in the next century. Climate change is shifting the location of arable lands, causing massive droughts, wildfires, and flooding, and intensifying the frequency and severity of storms. The World Health Organization (2011) estimated that climate change is now responsible for about 150,000 deaths each year; a newer report by the Climate Vulnerability Monitor estimated this number at more than 400,000 annual deaths, along with thousands of displacements (Climate Vulnerability Forum 2012).
Inequality, both within and between countries, affects the adaptive capacity of individuals faced with climate-related disruptions. Overall inequality is increasing in the Global
North, particularly as the richest 5 percent of households take home an ever-increasing percentage of the available income (Levine 2012). However, the rapid recent growth of previously poor countries like China and India has slightly decreased global inequality since its peak at the turn of the 21st century (Milanovic 2012). Still, the best predictor of our fiscal security remains the relative position in the global economic hierarchy of the country into which we are born (Milanovic 2012).
Another dimension of global inequality is environmental inequality. One form of environmental inequality is “environmentally unequal exchange,” wherein raw natural resources from countries all over the world become increasingly concentrated in the wealthier countries, while the poorer countries bear most of the environmental impacts of extracting them. The original concept of environmentally unequal exchange was developed by Stephen Bunker (1985) in his book Underdeveloping the Amazon:
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Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State, to describe how countries in the Amazon Basin were rapidly selling off their tropical rainforests to wealthier countries while leaving behind environmental destruction. More recently, this concept has been applied to the problem of climate change to bring attention to the fact that while it is the rich, industrialized countries that have contributed most to the atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration levels causing climate change, it is the poor countries with lower adaptive capacities that are feeling the damaging consequences of climate change first and worst (Parks and Roberts 2006). This process is another form of environmentally unequal exchange and it is widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots around the world. Climate justice advocates argue that these disparities between responsibility for climate change and vulnerability to its harmful effects mean rich, industrialized countries owe an ecological debt to poor, non-industrialized countries
(Ikeme 2003; Neumayer 2000; Norgaard 2012; Roberts and Parks 2009).
One of the results of global economic and environmental inequality is that it is obstructing efforts to reach a cooperative global agreement on climate change. In particular, these inequalities contribute to mistrust between countries and a sense of global environmental injustice (Najam 2004; Roberts and Parks 2007). Thus, despite the fact that data from the 2005-2008 World Values Survey reveal 89 percent of respondents from 48 countries believe global warming is a serious problem, and that the average proportion of respondents reporting concern for climate change is roughly equal among residents of economically developed, transitioning and developing countries, climate negotiations continue to fail. Residents of unequally developed countries disagree about
11 plans to limit economic growth to protect the environment, as well as which countries should assume primary responsibility for initial action.
In order to better understand the relationship between global economic position and concern for climate change, this dissertation examines the social, economic and political factors associated with concern for global warming and support for pro- environmental policies and behaviors in countries at different levels of economic development. In each of the three empirical articles I take a modified world-systems approach by deliberately focusing on variation between developed (roughly analogous to core) countries, transitioning (similar to semi-periphery) countries and developing
(periphery) countries (Wallerstein 1974). The first article, “Examining Environmental
Concern in Developed, Transitioning and Developing Countries,” provides a preliminary analysis of how two well-established predictors of environmental concern – objective environmental deterioration and subjective pro-environmental values – operate in countries categorized as economically developed, transitioning and developing. The objective of this study is to identify both whether there are differences in what motivates concern for the environment and compare the relative explanatory value of these popular theories of environmental concern in different economic contexts.
The second article, “World Citizenship and Concern for Global Warming:
Building the Case for a Strong International Civil Society,” invokes social psychological theories of social dilemmas and cooperation to explain how personal identification with more or less inclusive social groups might relate to concern for global warming. The paper also draws on the theory of reflexive modernization to explain why people in less
12 environmentally vulnerable countries still express concern for global warming despite their presently lower levels of climate risk. Instead of three categories (developed, transitioning and developing), the sample in this paper is divided into Annex I and Non-
Annex I countries based on the conceptual divisions for emissions reductions responsibilities outlined in the Kyoto Protocol. This paper makes several unexpected findings about the relationship between citizenship identities and concern for global warming that contribute to an ongoing debate in the sociological literature about the effect of collective versus individual orientations on mobilization to reduce environmental risks.
In the third article, “Towards Climate Justice: How Do the Most Vulnerable
Weigh Environment-Economy Trade-offs?” I test relationship between numerous measures of vulnerability to climate change and two expressions of pro-environmental attitudes: 1) whether an individual reports prioritizing environmental protection or economic growth, and 2) willingness to donate personal financial resources for the protection of the environment. I interpret the results through the lens of climate justice by emphasizing the preferences of the respondents most at-risk for climate-related disruptions and arguing that initial action to address climate change should come from the countries with the highest historical per capita GHG emissions.
I orient each of these articles within the sociological literatures on environmental concern, social dilemmas and cooperation, and climate justice and inequality. In the next section I provide a brief overview of these literatures and the insights sociologists have contributed to the study of the human response to climate change, and explain how this
13 past work influenced the design of my dissertation research. I conclude with a summary of the primary conclusions and policy recommendations that have emerged from this dissertation and a few ideas for future research on attitudes about global warming. The full text of each article follows this outline in Appendices A, B, and C.
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Environmental Concern Attempts to understand environmental concern among sociologists began with studies examining the demographic bases of pro-environmental attitudes and behavior.
Research has identified personal characteristics such as younger age, female sex, left political ideology, and educational attainment to be positively associated with environmentalism and environmental concern (Dunlap and McCright 2008; Jones and
Dunlap 1992; Kemmelmeier, Krol and Kim 2002; McCright and Dunlap 2011; Olofsson and Öhman 2006; Van Liere and Dunlap 1980; Zelezny, Chua and Aldrich 2000).
Explanations for why these factors positively correlate with environmental concern have pointed to youth participation in political movements, gender socialization that links women with nature and nurturance, the political right’s aversion to environmental regulations, and education’s impact on knowledge of social and environmental issues to help account for these associations.
In addition to these demographic studies, scholars have investigated the process by which pro-environmental orientations form, and whether different processes are at work in rich and poor countries. Among these initial efforts was Ronald Inglehart’s
(1995) study, “Public Support for Environmental Protection: Objective Problems and
Subjective Values in 43 Societies,” out of which two standard theories of environmental concern emerged. One of these was the objective problems explanation of environmentalism, which suggests that measurable environmental deterioration or specific hazardous events account for the development of pro-environmental attitudes in
15 the developing world. The second was the subjective values explanations, also referred to as the postmaterialist values thesis, which accounted for the presence of pro- environmentalism in more affluent countries by suggesting that the desire to protect the environment is motivated by quality of life and aesthetic concerns that people often focus on after their basic material requirements of food, clean water, health care and shelter have been met.
The postmaterialist values theory probably sparked more disagreement than any other hypothesis about the factors associated with environmental concern and the cross- national distribution of pro-environmental attitudes. After a lengthy debate, primarily in the 1990s (Abramson 1997; Brechin and Kempton 1994, 1997; Dunlap and Mertig 1995,
1997; Inglehart 1995; Kidd and Lee 1997), environmental sociologists began looking for other explanations to understand environmentalism around the world and account for the finding that overall rates of environmentalism were relatively similar in rich and poor countries (Brechin and Kempton 1994; Dunlap and York 2008). One of the most important insights of these efforts was that while environmentalists in the Global North are more likely to view environmental issues as separate from economic issues, environmentalists in the Global South often consider environmental and economic issues related, as well as relevant to the pursuit of basic human rights and distributive justice
(Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Guha 2000).
Researchers in developed countries point out these same sentiments among disadvantaged populations in the Global North. In her (1996) book Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest, sociologist Laura Pulido
16 develops a theory of the relationship between inequality and environmental concern that rests on the concept of the “subaltern” (those who are socially and economically marginalized), and highlights how political and power struggles overlap with environmental struggles. The framework of subalternity is useful for analyzing the intersection of different oppressions and the role of positionality (how one’s position in relation to an issue affects one’s interpretation of the issue) on the formation of environmental values. In this way it can be understood that even among residents of developed countries, environmentalism is often about economic security, social justice and the allocation of natural resources rather than the preservation of nature in its most pristine state for the subaltern and impoverished. This suggests that environmental values often interrelate with social identities and economic inequality, so that inequality and oppression need to be considered when environmental disputes arise.
Somewhat in tandem but also removed from the back-and-forth over postmaterialism, a number of European scholars were developing more global explanations of concern for environmental problems. Green political theorists began discussing so-called “ecological citizens” – individuals who recognize modern threats to the global environment and consider commitment to environmental sustainability a requirement for participation in civil society (Barry 1996; Carter 2007; Dobson 2007;
Giddens 1991; Habermas 1993). Emerging from this same school of thought is German sociologist Ulrich Beck and his risk society thesis, outlined in his influential (1992) book
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Beck’s risk society theory posits that society is experiencing a growing awareness about the environmental risks associated with living in
17 the modern world. This sense of diffuse but poorly understood risk causes mistrust and dissatisfaction with traditional authority and institutions, and ultimately contributes to a growing sense of insecurity and environmental concern.
Concern for Climate Change
A smaller number of studies have examined the factors associated with concern for the specific environmental problem of climate change. As with more general environmental problems, scholars have found that females, non-whites and self-identified liberals are more likely to express concern about climate change than are conservative, white men (Hamilton 2008; Leiserowitz and Akerlof 2010; Leiserowitz 2006; McCright
2010; McCright and Dunlap 2011; Wood and Vedlitz 2007). On a global level, some studies have also found that citizens from poorer nations typically express more concern for global warming than do citizens from wealthier countries (Dunlap 1998; Norgaard
2012; O’Connor et al. 2002; Sandvik 2008), but other work has found little difference in overall levels of concern between rich and poor countries (Brechin and Kempton 1994;
Dunlap and York 2008).
The attention to global economic inequality for theories of concern for climate change is understandable in the short term because economic and political inequalities are a major source of friction at climate negotiations. These inequalities also directly affect nation-states’ adaptive capacity to protect their citizens from climate change’s harmful effects. Moreover, there are inequalities in who reaps the benefits and who takes on the burdens of climate change, which is one aspect of what Parks and Roberts (2006) have called “environmental globalization.” In their book, A Climate of Injustice: Global
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Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy, Roberts and Parks (2007) argue that the world’s poor are much more vulnerable to “climate-related suffering” than are individuals in wealthier nations.
In the long term, however, global environmental problems like climate change will be impossible to fully escape, even with considerable economic resources. This is when Ulrich Beck’s expectation of democratizing risk will come into play, potentially resulting in a steady increase in environmental concern over time as the damaging consequences of climate change and other environmental problems become increasingly visible (Beck 1992).
Climate Change as an Asymmetrical Social Dilemma
Still, for the time being, global inequality is important for understanding the worldwide distribution of concern for climate change as the individuals currently experiencing the brunt of climate-related problems are the world’s poor (Anderegg et al.
2010; Climate Vulnerability Forum 2012; Roberts and Park 2007; World Bank Report
2010). The unequal distribution of the benefits of climate change inducing activities and the burdens they create are also why climate change can be characterized as an asymmetrical social dilemma. Typical social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests conflict with individual interests (Dawes 1980; Kollock 1998; Simpson 2006;
Van Lange et al. 1992). Social dilemmas arise when actions that maximize individual interests harm collective interests. Climate change is a specific type of social dilemma called an asymmetric resource social dilemma, or a dilemma involving common resources (in this case, atmospheric space) in which the costs and benefits of the resource
19 depletion are distributed unequally (Eek, Biel and Gärling 2001; Van Lange et al. 1992).
With respect to climate change, the burdens of emitting high amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) disproportionately harms people in environmentally and economically vulnerable countries, while the benefits of GHG emissions, including lucrative industrial activity and personal conveniences, accrue primarily to people in economically well off countries.
Climate Inequality, Vulnerability and Justice
Environmental sociological work has frequently focused on issues of inequality, vulnerability and fairness regarding exposure to hazardous environmental conditions – collectively referred to as environmental justice. With respect to climate change, research has concluded that some individuals are more vulnerable to climate change than others based on a variety of factors such as physical risk from environmental context
(Parry et al. 2007), and social inequality and poverty that limit adaptive capacity (Adger et al. 2005; Eriksen and O’Brien 2007). These disparities in vulnerability to climate change are collectively referred to as “climate inequality” (Roberts and Parks 2007). In their study of the determinants of climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level, Brooks, Adger and Kelly (2005) found access to sanitation, literacy rates, and governance indicators such as participation in the political process to be among the key indicators of vulnerability. Countries suffering from “structural vulnerabilities,” including economic and political weakness from colonial histories, social divisiveness, deteriorating infrastructure, price volatility, food insecurity, environmental pollution, weak civil societies and/or corrupt political institutions, high income and wealth
20 inequality, and large percentages of workers employed in informal sectors have also been found to be especially vulnerable (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001; Parks and
Roberts 2006; Roberts and Parks 2007; Ward and Shively 2012).
One of the primary objectives of environmental justice research has been to document social group inequality in experiencing environmental problems. Regarding the social distribution of climate effects, the poor, women and people of color throughout the world are disproportionately burdened and vulnerable (Bullard and Wright 2009;
IPCC 2007; Hoerner and Robinson 2008; Norgaard 2012; Parks and Roberts 2006;
Roberts 2001; Sweetman 2009). These class and race-based disparities in climate change’s negative effects exist both within and between countries. One illustrative example of this in the United States is the comparably worse experience among African
American residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In this case, racial and economic inequality adversely affected resiliency and recovery in the months and years following the hurricane (Pastor et al. 2006). More generally, a report entitled “A
Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy for the U.S.” documented the disproportionate burden African American households could face when dealing with the effects of proposed climate change and emissions reductions policies, especially those that would increase the price of energy (Hoerner and Robinson
2008). This is despite the fact that African American households’ average per capita emissions are about 20 percent lower than non-Hispanic white households (Hoerner and
Robinson 2008). This case mirrors the worldwide climate justice struggles associated with climate change which revolves around the unequal distribution of responsibility,
21 impacts, and costs and benefits of the activities that contribute to accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
In response to this growing body of evidence about the environmental inequalities associated with climate change, a relatively new line of research and activism is dedicated to “climate justice,” which seeks to highlight the ethical considerations that should be included in plans to address climate change (Harris 2010; Harris and Symons
2010; Hayward 2007; Ikeme 2003; Parks and Roberts 2010; Penetrante 2011; Roberts and Parks 2007; Roberts and Parks 2009). Advocates of climate justice are especially keen to promote the transfer of resources from historically high emissions countries to areas like the Pacific Island nations that are facing extreme conditions and loss of habitable land as a result of climate change (Neumayer 2000). Climate justice supporters also take the somewhat controversial position that there may be a baseline amount of per capita GHG emissions that are necessary to achieve a basic standard of living, and that some climate policies could end up exacerbating existing inequalities, resulting in a second order injustice. This raises tensions among environmentalists who believe the best course of action would be to implement sweeping and immediate climate policies to reduce worldwide GHG emissions and those who believe that actions to address global warming should be restricted to the world’s most privileged citizens, because “what the worst off have a right to is secure access to the means to a decent life” (Hayward 2007:
431).
From a cooperation standpoint a climate justice perspective also highlights how one’s concept of equity and justice in confronting climate change depends on one’s
22 position within the global economic hierarchy (Ikeme 2003; Penetrante 2011). The focus of people from the Global South has generally been on corrective, distributive and procedural justice, including the dissemination of resources from high to low emissions countries to atone for historical emissions excess, while residents of the Global North usually favor developing the most economically efficient path forward while grandfathering in past pollution (Ikeme 2003; Neumayer 2000; Roberts 2001). Given all of these reasons to expect global inequality to affect how individuals formulate attitudes about the environment, a main objective of this dissertation is to better understand the relationship between global economic positioning, concern for climate change, and support for various environmental policies and behaviors.
Primary Conclusions and Policy Recommendations
One of the main conclusions of this dissertation research is that environmental concern – in particular the specific predictors and demographic characteristics that are positively associated with environmental concern – are better theorized for people living in economically developed countries where many of the studies on environmentalism are focused. Among the most influential social scientific theories of environmental concern is the postmaterialist values explanation, which posits that people cannot begin to think about the environment until their material needs are met. There has been empirical support for this theory, based especially on data from prior waves of the World Values
Survey (Inglehart 1995), but part of the discrepancy between levels of environmental concern found in rich and poor countries are probably due to conceptual and measurement issues. It is likely that environmental concern has been misrecognized in
23 developing countries because scholars from the Global North are culturally conditioned to think about environmental protection and economic growth as competing goals. As a result, global surveys that measure environmental concern as distinct from economic security have probably underestimated environmental concern in contexts in which economic activities rely on environmental resources. From a scholarly standpoint, future research on environmental concern, including that focused on specific environmental problems like climate change, should intentionally include a consideration of inequality in research designs and interpretation. From a policy standpoint, it should be recognized that best practice environmental policy does not have to be about pure preservation.
Moreover, policymakers need to acknowledge that environmentally sustainable economic activity is possible and make efforts to encourage these types of economic activities while regulating economic growth that truly does come at the expense of the environment.
This is particularly important from a climate justice perspective given the conclusion from the third article of this dissertation that, though people in developing countries are less likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, they are more likely to report willingness to donate their own incomes for the benefit of the environment. Putting these findings together conveys a different story compared to analyzing the response of either of these questions in isolation. It is also a striking finding from a policy perspective because it reveals the seriousness with which individuals in these developing countries are taking environmental degradation. This is exemplified by the 96 percent of people in Vietnam, where gross national per capita
24 income is about $1,100 and climate risk is extremely high (United Nations Data 2011), who consider environmental pollution serious enough to sacrifice their personal financial resources for its prevention.
Another noteworthy finding is that females express more concern for the environment and climate change than males in developed, Annex I countries, while there is no sex difference in environmental concern in developing, Non-Annex I countries. It is difficult to interpret this discrepancy, especially because many scholars have pointed out that women in poorer countries are particularly vulnerable to climate-related changes
(Norgaard 2012; Shiva 2005; Sweetman 2009). The most likely explanation is that this is another example of the effect of privilege on concern (or lack of concern) for environmental problems. As McCright and Dunlap (2011) argue, those benefiting most from the status quo are most likely to resist the changes in current economic practices that seriously addressing climate change will require, and presently the winners of the economic order are white males in the developed countries. Thus, perhaps what this finding ultimately reveals is that rates of environmental concern are actually more similar between females in developed countries and respondents of both sexes in the developing world. It may be that males in wealthier countries are actually the outliers from a global perspective, as the geographically and socially privileged group with the least incentive to be concerned about climate change.
Finally, with respect to the effect of collective social identities, my finding that individuals who identify as world citizens are more likely to report concern for global warming suggests the value of promoting a shared citizenship identity among people in
25 all countries of the world. I would also argue that this should be accompanied by deemphasizing national citizenships, which have the potential to be divisive and create stalemates wherein individuals focus exclusively on the outcomes of their in-group members.
The more fine-tuned finding from this research that world citizenship only increases concern for global warming among people identifying simultaneously as autonomous individuals helps solve a puzzle in the environmental sociological literature about the effect of individual orientations on mobilization to solve environmental problems. In particular, this finding brings the value of collective social identities together with past research that has found individuals attempting to minimize their own exposure to environmental risks through personal behaviors like buying organic produce or bottled water (Szasz 2007). I think the lesson in this story is that people make personal decisions and form environmental values based neither on wholly altruistic nor entirely selfish considerations. Rather, as social animals most people are concerned with minimizing others’ exposure to environmental risks as well as their own, as long as they are people with whom they identify in some way. Ultimately, we do not have to consider environment-related behavior to protect oneself as necessarily at odds with more collective forms of pro-environmental action.
Probably the most important implication of the association between world citizenship and concern for global warming is what it suggests about how the structure of climate negotiations could be improved. Currently, the way climate negotiations are organized encourages nation-states to compete against each other for the best possible
26 outcome for themselves instead of incentivizing cooperation to reach the best overall solution. Just as Olson (1965) predicted, this arrangement has exacerbated feelings of fear and greed (and the mistrust that ensues) and resulted in a series of “mostly fails” at international climate meetings. So, to the extent that a climate agreement can be pushed forward by a grassroots movement, a strong international civil society of self-identified world citizens would aid this process. It would also be useful for climate negotiators themselves to adopt world citizenship identities. In my utopian worldview moments, I like to imagine that highlighting our shared identity as humans could help us feel more connected and reduce the sense of competition at climate negotiations, allowing us to eventually get beyond the current gridlock.
Future Research
The human response to climate change will require, and I am sure receive, much greater attention in the coming years. It is already getting more media coverage and political interest (both from climate advocates and deniers) every year. I would like to be optimistic that humanity will collectively launch a concerted effort to address the changing climate, but even if we do I doubt we have time to avert a global climate crisis of some magnitude. What we do have time to do, however, is make every effort to improve climate justice as much as possible. What this means is that scholars, activists, policymakers and negotiators should all pay particular attention to issues of social, cultural, political and economic inequality.
With respect to future research, the World Values Survey network is currently carrying out a new wave of surveys in 2011-2012 that are scheduled to be released to the
27 public in early 2014. The survey instrument for this wave includes more numerous questions about environmental attitudes and will offer a rich source upon which to further the research I have begun in my dissertation. Additionally, in 2013 the development organization Germanwatch released the eighth annual Climate Change Performance
Index. These data rank the climate policies of the 58 highest-emitting countries from most to least climate-friendly and will allow for a systematic cross-national comparison of changes (and the factors contributing to those changes) in national climate policies in recent years. The upcoming wave of the World Values Survey will also provide data with which to assess changes in climate concern over the last ten years. Combined with a full range of country level variables and their changes over the last decade, these data could be used to identify the factors associated with increasing and decreasing concern and national policy action regarding climate change.
I also am very interested in the increasingly energetic debate about the relationship between citizenship, environmentalism and the potential for reflexive modernization. A growing body of theoretical and empirical work, especially by Andrew
Dobson, Angel Valencia Sáiz and Anthony Giddens, focuses on how conceptions of citizenship could improve our chances of achieving long-term sustainability. Through my work on citizenship identities and evaluations of global warming I have become persuaded that these collective social identities are important building blocks for generating ecologically sustainable policies. In the future I would like to take a closer look at how different social groups define what constitutes environmentally responsible citizenship – a line of questioning that could yield useful insights into how people think
28 about their role in tackling environmental challenges. I also think it will be vitally important for future research on the human response to climate change to promote the inclusion of research from scholars in developing and environmentally vulnerable countries.
At all levels (global, national, local), research on social and environmental sustainability is crucial. The questions that environmental sociologists have historically focused on overlap with other subfields of social scientific research, and efforts should be made to combine relevant theoretical and empirical research along problem-centered lines. By doing so, it would be my hope that interdisciplinary scholarship on environmental issues would help generate policies that are sustainable, equitable, and widely supported.
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PRESENT STUDY
Each of the papers appended to this dissertation constitute fully developed empirical research papers oriented within the sociological literature on environmental concern, social dilemmas and cooperation, and climate justice and inequality. In each article I take a modified world-systems approach by dividing my sample into two or three economic development categories (developed, transitioning and developing or Annex I and Non-Annex I) and analyzing these nested data using multilevel modeling techniques.
This section summarizes the theoretical and methodological frameworks, key findings, and main conclusions of each study.
Appendix A – ‘Examining Environmental Concern in Developed, Transitioning and Developing Countries’
This article addresses an ongoing debate in environmental sociology about the extent to which environmental concern is a result of the objective deterioration of environmental conditions or subjective values among environmentally-oriented individuals. The objective problems explanation of environmental concern suggests that exposure to measurable environmental deterioration or specific hazardous events account for shifts in attitudes in favor of environmental protection. Some studies have found a positive association between problematic environmental conditions and concern for climate change (Brody, Zahran, Vedlitz and Grover 2008). There is also evidence of elevated concern for climate-related consequences among regional coalitions like the
Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at climate negotiations. The affluence or “post- materialist” explanation of environmental concern suggests that it is only after basic
30 materials needs such as access to sufficient food, clean water, health care and shelter that people become concerned about the environment in large numbers.
Using measures of a country’s overall risk for climate-related disasters from
Germanwatch’s 2010 Climate Risk Index, the prevalence of post-materialist value orientations and the percentage of a country’s population that expresses concern for global warming from the 2005-2008 World Values Survey this paper tests whether support for either of these explanations is found in 44 countries. The results are compared between economically developed, transitioning and developing countries in order to evaluate the differences among economically unequal countries. I begin with a series of graphs to illustrate the bivariate relationships between the primary predictors of interest and the dependent variables. Next, due to the binary nature of the dependent variable and the nested structure of the data I use multilevel logistic regression to assess the statistical significance of the relationships while controlling for predictors found by past research to be relevant.
Overall the findings contradict the objective problems explanation and find support for the subjective values explanation only in the most economically developed countries. They also contradict the notion that environmental concern is found primarily in developed countries: The average percentage of citizens for whom global warming is considered to be a very serious problem is nearly the same in all three development categories (62% in developed countries, 60% in transitioning, and 61% in developing countries). I also find that there is much less variation in the factors that predict concern for global warming in developed countries compared to transitioning and developing
31 countries. I argue that we have a better understanding of the factors that motivate environmental concern in more affluent countries.
Appendix B – ‘Citizenship and Concern for Global Warming: Building the Case for a Strong International Civil Society’
This article draws on social psychological theories of collective action problems and conceptualizes climate change as an asymmetrical social dilemma. Based on the finding from social psychological studies that people who share a collective identity are more likely to cooperate with each other, and reflexive modernization theory that suggests concern for global environmental problems is increasing in our ever more connected global world, this paper investigates how citizenship identities affect evaluations of global warming. Using the World Values Survey data and multilevel models I test the effect of four collective identities – world citizen, national citizen, local community member, and autonomous individual – on the odds that an individual evaluates global warming to be a very serious problem.
I find that identification as a world citizen is a good predictor of concern for global warming in industrialized countries – better, in fact, than any of the standard predictors of pro-environmental attitudes. I also find that identification as an autonomous citizen increases the likelihood an individual will evaluate global warming as very serious. Based on these results I construct a typology of each possible combination of collectivist and individualist identities and find that concern for global warming is elevated only among people who identify as both world citizens and autonomous individuals. This conclusion adds nuance to the debate in sociology regarding the extent to which actions that protect oneself against environmental risks are inherently
32 demobilizing for environmental movements, suggesting that identification as an autonomous individual – potentially accompanied by an awareness of personal risk – does not necessarily preclude more collective social identities. I argue that emphasizing the shared and individual risks of modernization is one useful strategy for promoting concern for climate change.
Appendix C –‘Towards Climate Justice: How do the Most Vulnerable Weigh Environment-Economy Trade-offs?’
This paper employs multilevel models to examine the relationship between climate vulnerability and support for two measure of environmental concern. Using the
2005-2008 World Values Survey, the 2010 Climate Risk Index, and World Bank development indicators this paper compares opinions on environment-economy trade-offs and willingness to make personal financial contributions to protect the environment among residents of 41 countries.
Results reveal that individuals in economically developing countries are less likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth. Nonetheless, the study also finds that residents of less economically advantaged countries are more likely to express willingness to donate personal income for environmental protection than citizens of wealthier nations. In light of these findings I argue that an explicit recognition of global economic inequality and social and environmental vulnerability should be incorporated into international climate negotiations, and that efforts to limit economic growth should be reserved to affluent countries.
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APPENDIX A – EXAMINING ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN IN DEVELOPED, TRANSITIONING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Paper is pending publication in World Values Research
Abstract
An ongoing debate in environmental sociology is the extent to which concern about environmental problems is a result of the objective deterioration of environmental conditions or subjective values among environmentally-oriented individuals. This study tests both explanations using multilevel models and data from the 2005-2008 World Values Survey and the Climate Risk Index to evaluate concern for global warming and prioritizing environmental protection in 44 countries at various stages of economic development. Findings indicate that a country’s recent experience with climate-related environmental disasters has little to no effect on concern for global warming – results that contradict the objective problems explanation of environmental concern. The subjective values explanation receives more support, particularly in countries at the most advanced stage of economic development. As environmental problems become increasingly salient, understanding how economic development status conditions environmental concern could improve international efforts to address climate change and other important environmental problems.
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Introduction
The evidence is growing that global climate change is transforming the earth’s natural conditions as we know them – changes that have begun causing serious problems for human life. Deaths, displacements, disease and drought are just a few of these increasingly common problems: The World Health Organization estimates that about
150,000 people die annually due to the effects of global warming (World Health Report
2011); the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati may become the first nation that global warming’s effects render uninhabitable; infectious vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue are on the rise (Climate Change and Human Health 2003); and a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations documented food shortages brought on by severe droughts in India’s Andhra Pradesh region. Many other areas are being threatened by the depletion of fresh water sources on account of rapidly melting glaciers in mid-latitude mountain ranges. These are just a few of the consequences of climate change with which populations around the world are already being forced to contend.
Yet, in many parts of the world climate change remains an abstract concept, or worse, a controversial scientific theory that some people dismiss. Even people who accept the science admit it is difficult to make precise predictions about how climate change will play out. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report summarizes the observed changes in climate and its causes and effects on natural and human systems, but ends by discussing the key uncertainties remaining in our scientific knowledge to date.
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Because of these and other factors, support for action to address climate change is inconsistent. At both local and national levels some actors have taken proactive steps to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate future warming, while others have done little or nothing so far. A similar discrepancy exists between whether various actors consider global warming to be a serious problem or not. Worldwide, most individuals do consider global warming a serious problem. Results from the most recent wave of the World
Values Survey, a nationally representative survey of a diverse set of countries around the world, show that 89% of people from 44 countries evaluate global warming to be at least somewhat serious, and 60% evaluate global warming to be a very serious issue.
Moreover, at the national level most countries have begun to take some form of action.
This is best illustrated by the 189 nations that have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, but is also seen in the aggressive climate legislation passed in a few countries. For example, in
2008 the United Kingdom approved the Climate Change Act which pledges to reduce carbon emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050 – a commitment far beyond what most other nations are considering. Overall, action to address global warming is becoming progressively more common, and the position that it is a serious problem exists in economically, politically, and socially diverse countries. Still, differences remain. So what explains why some countries have a larger proportion of residents concerned about global warming than others? Moreover, do different factors drive environmental concern in different contexts?
This study tests two primary explanations of environmental concern – the objective problems explanation and the subjective values explanation – in 44 countries to
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determine whether either can help account for concern for global warming and the prioritization of environmental protection, and whether one or the other applies better under specific conditions. Data for this study come from the 2005-2008 wave of the
World Values Survey and a country-level measure of objective risk to climate change, the
Climate Risk Index. While many studies of environmentalism focus primarily on individual-level variation and demographic factors, I embed individual responses to questions measuring public opinion about global warming within specific economic and environmental contexts by using multilevel models and dividing my sample into economically developed, transitioning and developing countries. In order to assess differences between these three country categories I also graph the bivariate correlations between the key variables to examine whether different patterns of the motivation for concern for global warming are visible.
I distinguish between countries with developed, transitioning and developing economies because many plans to mitigate climate change include policy proposals that would affect further economic development, especially industrial development, and include measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in other sectors that could also impact economic growth. Scholars have also suggested that economic inequality is fundamental for both how environmental problems are understood and valued (Guha
&Martinez-Alier, 1997), as well as preferences about how global environmental problems like climate change should be addressed (Roberts & Parks, 2007). This suggests attitudes about global warming may be conditioned upon the economic climate in which citizens live and work, and that a systematic investigation of whether popular
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theories of environmental concern apply in different economic contexts could advance our understanding of how people around the world think about global environmental problems, ultimately improving attempts to achieve international cooperation. In a recent paper about environmental concern in industrialized countries, Marquart-Pyatt (2008) recommended that in order to better understand environmentalism worldwide scholars
“pursue a systematic, broad-ranging investigation that includes a variety of contexts (i.e., industrialized and industrializing), multiple levels of analysis (i.e., both individual- and national-level forces) (1332).” Thus, in this paper I follow that advice and divide my sample into three analytic categories based on those created by the Kyoto Protocol and utilize multilevel models to account for both individual and country-level variation.
Theory and Hypotheses
Objective Problems Explanation
One frequent explanation for environmental concern suggests that environmental degradation prompts individuals to prioritize the protection of the environment. This explanation has been called the “objective problems explanation” because it relies on measurable environmental deterioration or specific hazardous events to account for changes in attitudes towards the environment. Indeed, there is circumstantial evidence that environmental vulnerability has motivated some nations to support aggressive action during climate change negotiations. At recent talks the most vocal and insistent negotiating representatives were those from countries at especially high risk for climate- related problems. Many of these nations also participate in regional coalitions like the
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Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to design adaptation strategies and cooperative risk management plans.
Research findings from scientific studies have also found connections between environmental vulnerability and environmental concern. Using GIS analytic techniques and survey data on individuals’ support for climate policies, Zahran, Brody, Grover and
Vedlitz (2006) found a significant positive relationship between perceptions of objective risk to climate change and support for international climate action in the United States.
In a subsequent U.S. study, Brody, Zahran, Vedlitz and Grover (2008) found that problematic environmental conditions led to increased levels of perceived risk to climate change. Put together, these results suggest that threatening physical conditions do elevate perceived risk to environmental hazards, which in turn increase support for pro- environmental policies. However, other studies have produced conflicting findings, particularly in regards to taking individual action to help protect the environment.
Whitmarsh (2008) received mixed results in her study of whether individuals who feel particularly vulnerable to environmental problems express more willingness to act to address climate change, Blake (2001) found that while personal contact with environmental degradation increased protest behavior it decreased willingness to take on economic costs to counteract the impacts, and Longhofer and Schofer (2010) found that environmental degradation was not associated with participation in voluntary environmental associations. Thus, despite some affirmative evidence, the relationship between environmental risk and environmental concern is clearly complicated and depends on a variety of contextual factors.
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Subjective Values Explanation
Another frequently cited theory to explain concern among citizens for the natural environment, particularly in affluent countries, is the “post-materialist” value explanation. The original theory of post-materialism, formulated by American political scientist Ronald Inglehart in the 1970s, suggests that once basic material needs are met such as access to enough food, clean water, health care and shelter, individuals often begin focusing on non-essential quality of life issues such as personal freedom, justice, government participation and intellectual development. This theory helps explain the desire to protect the environment by conceptualizing pro-environmental attitudes as motivated by quality of life and aesthetic concerns – political priorities that go beyond basic needs and thus fit within the post-materialist value framework (Abramson &
Inglehart, 1995). According to a post-materialist explanation, pro-environmental attitudes are more common among the relatively affluent because they are more likely to prioritize the pursuit of a high-quality life and the preservation of outdoor recreational areas over basic security and social order, which they already enjoy.
The post-materialist value explanation has met with skepticism by some scholars, however, especially regarding its ability to explain environmental concern in less economically well-off nations. Some studies have shown comparable levels of overall environmental concern in developed and developing countries (Brechin &
Kempton, 1994; Dunlap & York, 2008), suggesting that other explanations are needed to account for this environmental concern among the less affluent. There has even been considerable disagreement about the role of post-materialist values compared to objective
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factors in accounting for between-country differences in environmental concern (Brechin
& Kempton, 1997; Brechin, 1999; Dunlap & York, 2008; Kid & Lee, 1997). Here, the post-materialist value explanation will be compared to the objective problem explanation of environmental concern to explain evaluations of the seriousness of global warming and the prioritization of environmental protection in developed, transitioning and developing countries.
Data and Methods
Data
Data for this study come from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey
(WVS) and the 2010 Climate Risk Index (CRI). An ongoing data collection effort that began in 1981 and has conducted surveys in more than 100 countries over the past 30 years, The World Values Survey is a unique data source for analyzing trends in social, political, and cultural values, demographics and public opinion. It is also well-suited for answering questions about environmental values, including opinions about global warming, because no other academic survey has measured concern for this issue in as many countries worldwide. Most other surveys of environmental attitudes have focused on one country or region at a time, and thus render analysis of cross-country differences problematic. Even if data can be accumulated from multiple surveys, question wording is analytically important and can lead to variation that may simply be a function of the measurement instrument (Klineberg, McKeever, & Rothenbach, 1998; Marquart-Pyatt,
2007). For these reasons, the 2005-2008 World Values Survey constitutes an excellent
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and broad-gauge dataset for evaluating cross-national differences in environmental concern and opinions about global warming. The Climate Risk Index is a measure compiled by the development organization Germanwatch to assess the relative vulnerability to climate-related disasters between countries.
The results presented in this paper analyze the 44 countries that administered the full version of the World Values Survey and also have scores for climate risk. These countries include Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada,
Chile, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia,
Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania,
Rwanda, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
Thailand, Trinidad Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Vietnam and Zambia.1 In each participating country the survey is conducted in the local language by a principal investigator and her or his team. The average number of individuals surveyed in each country is around 1,500, though final sample sizes for each country range from 1,000 to
3,050. Results are then translated and compiled into a single dataset for straightforward comparisons. After excluding missing data the following analyses are based on responses from 37,435 individuals in 44 countries.
Dependent Variables
I use two different dependent measures of environmental concern. The first of these measures a respondent’s opinion about the seriousness of global warming. The
1 China and Malaysia were not asked about political ideology but are still included in the bivariate graphs, except that of the relationship between political ideology and concern for global warming.
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original question on the WVS reads: “Please tell me how serious you consider global warming or the greenhouse effect to be for the world as a whole?” The survey offered four response categories to this question including very serious (1), somewhat serious (2), not very serious (3), or not serious at all (4). For the purpose of this analysis I dichotomize concern for global warming, coding an answer of “very serious” to this question as one as this response likely indicates a stronger and more completely formed opinion about global warming.2 The other three responses are coded as zero. The percentage of respondents choosing “very serious” in each country ranges from a low of
49% in Romania to a high of 75% in Spain, with an average of 60% in all 44 countries combined.
The second dependent measure in this analysis juxtaposes a preference for environmental protection against a preference for economic growth, which is useful for determining the strength of one’s concern for the environment compared to other common goals. The questions asks: “Which of the following two statements comes closer to your own values: Protecting the environment should be given priority, even if it causes slower economic growth and some loss of jobs or economic growth and creating jobs should be the top priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent?” This question requires respondents to choose between economic growth and environmental protection, providing an indication of how committed one is to proactively protecting the environment in light of probable policy tradeoffs. In these analyses the choice of the first
2 I also ran models coding both answers of “very serious” or “somewhat serious” as one and performed goodness-of-fit tests to decide upon the chosen coding strategy.
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statement, indicating a preference for environmental protection, is coded as one, while choosing the second statement in favor of economic growth is coded as zero.
Independent Variables
The two primary independent variables of interest are climate risk, measured at the country level, and post-materialist values, measured at the individual level. The climate risk variable is calculated using Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index (CRI) which assesses the country-wide impact of weather-related disasters that took place in each country from 1990-2008 based on four indicators: annual death toll from weather-related events, deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, total losses in purchasing power parity (in million
U.S. $), and losses per unit of GDP in percent. The CRI is designed to identify the countries hardest hit by extreme weather events in order to help develop adaptation strategies for these and other countries that will likely experience similar events in the future. Thus, the CRI is a good quantification of a country’s recent experiences with objective environmental problems, as well as the probability that it will continue to suffer from disruptive climate-related events. The raw CRI ranks countries from 1 to 151.75 with 1 being the most impacted and at-risk country in the world. For the purposes of this analysis I reverse the index so that larger numbers indicate higher climate risk scores in order to make interpretation more intuitive.
The second primary independent variable of interest is the effect of holding post- materialist values on attitudes towards the environment. The Post-materialist Value
Index is a measure embedded within the World Values Survey based on a respondent’s ranking of the following priorities: maintaining order in the nation, giving people more
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say in important political decisions, fighting rising prices, and protecting freedom of speech. The index is designed to determine whether an individual prioritizes economic and physical security, which are considered materialist values, or freedom and self- expression, which are considered post-materialist values. The measure is continuous and ranges from 0-5.
Control Variables
Two factors past research has identified as highly related to concern for the environment are education and political ideology. Specifically, it has been found that people with higher levels of overall education (Hines, Hungerford, & Tomera, 1987;
Van Liere & Dunlap, 1980) and those with left-leaning political ideologies (Dunlap &
McCright, 2008; Olofsson & Öhman, 2006; Skrentny, 1993) are the most environment- friendly. Thus, in the following analysis I also include a measure of the average educational attainment of a country’s population and a measure of the proportion of a country’s citizenry with leftist political leanings based upon individual responses from the World Values Survey in order to determine the effect of the primary variables of interest beyond that accounted for by these established predictors. Education is measured on a scale ranging from one to nine, with one indicating no education and nine indicating a university education, with degree. Political ideology is measured on a scale from one to 10, with one being the most leftist and 10 the farthest to the right. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for these measures for developed, transitioning and developing countries.
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Methods
I first present a series of graphs to visually illustrate the relationships between the primary predictors of interest and the dependent variables. For each independent variable
I graph its association with considering global warming very serious in all of the countries and then separately for developed, transitioning and developing countries.
Next, I estimate two sets of multilevel logistic regression models to test the statistical significance of these relationships while controlling for predictors that past research have found to be important. Multilevel models are the preferred statistical method for data such as these, in which individuals are nested within countries, because they can correct for biased standard errors due to the dependence of individual factors based on country of residence (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002). They are also useful for analyzing the extent to which variation in the dependent variable is a result of between-individual or between- country differences. I employ logistic regression because of the binary nature of the outcome variables. In these models, self-reported concern for global warming is a dichotomous response, in which the probability that the response is equal to one is defined as Υij = Pr(γij=1), where i represents the individual and j represents the country of residence. In the first set of models the dependent variable is the log odds of considering global warming very serious. In the second model it is the log odds of prioritizing the environment over economic growth. Raw logistic regression coefficients are translated into odds ratios by exponentiating the coefficients (eg. exp(.11)=1.12).
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The countries are divided into separate development categories based on the conceptual divisions between Annex I, Annex II and Non-Annex I countries made by the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the Kyoto
Protocol, as well as memberships in key international economic associations such as the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Group of 20
(G20) for the categorization of the transitioning countries. Under the Kyoto Protocol,
Annex I countries are those that have emissions reductions commitments because of their industrialized economies and their historical contributions to the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Annex II countries are a sub-group of Annex I countries which are recognized as possessing economies in transition and thus have less stringent emissions reductions commitments. Non-Annex I countries are those that do not have immediate requirements for reducing emissions levels under the current climate agreement due to their historically low greenhouse gas emissions. Countries categorized as developed in the analysis are Andorra, Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany,
Italy, Japan, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. Transitioning countries include Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Mexico,
Moldova, Peru, Poland, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine. The countries categorized as developing are Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Jordan, Mali, Morocco, Rwanda, Trinidad Tobago, Uruguay, Vietnam and
Zambia.
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Results
An initial look at the bivariate relationship between climate risk and concern for global warming suggests a slightly negative correlation between the two (r = -.21) when all of the countries are graphed together. The slope of the line falls slightly as a country’s climate risk score increases, but the relationship is weak. This result is the opposite of that hypothesized. Dividing the countries into separate economic development categories reveals that the negative correlation primarily exists in developing countries (r = -.50) and transitioning countries (r = -.39), however, while the correlation between climate risk and considering global warming to be very serious is weakly positive in developed countries
(r = .14). Figures 1-4 provide visual representations of these relationships. Andorra is left out of these graphs because it is not included in Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index.
I next plot the relationship between post-materialist value orientations and concern for global warming. Similar to the association between climate risk and concern for global warming, the correlation between post-materialism and considering global warming very serious is very weak when all of the countries are graphed together – a result that appears to be at odds with past research that has found a strong relationship between post-materialism and pro-environmental attitudes (Dekker, Ester, & Nas, 1997;
Franzen & Meyer, 2010; Inglehart, 1995; Oreg & Katz, 2006). Here, as a country’s average post-materialism score increases, the percentage of that country’s population evaluating global warming to be a very serious problem changes very little (r = .13).
Again however, stronger relationships emerge upon dividing the countries into separate economic development categories, particularly in transitioning countries, where the
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relationship is in the hypothesized direction (r = .21). However, the correlation between post-materialism and concern for global warming is very weak in developed countries (r
= -.08) and negative in developing countries (r = -.24). These results are presented in
Figures 5-8.
In order to test whether a well-established predictor of environmentalism holds up in these data, Figures 9-12 depict the associations between education and concern for global warming. Especially in regards to the complex issue of global warming, which may rely more on the ability to understand scientific theories than other problems, education may be an important factor for considering global warming a very serious problem.
As with each of the two primary independent variables of interest, when all of the countries are plotted together education and concern for global warming do not seem to be correlated with one another at all. After separation into economic development categories, a slightly positive relationship emerges in developed countries: as the average education level of a country’s citizenry increases in developed countries, so does the proportion of residents who evaluate global warming to be very serious (r = .22). There is virtually no relationship between education and concern for global warming in transitioning and developing countries. The graphs for the effect of education are presented in Figures 9-12.
The last set of graphs depict the bivariate correlations between political ideology and concern for global warming, presented in Figures 13-16. Among studies conducted in developed countries, political ideology is one of the most consistent factors predicting
2006; Skrentny, 1993). In particular, left-leaning individuals are more likely to consider environmental problems serious and favor proactive policies to preserve and protect the environment and promote environmental justice.
Of all of the factors considered, political ideology appears to have the strongest effect on attitudes about global warming. In all of the development categories, identification with right-leaning politics is associated with a smaller share of a country’s population expressing concern for global warming; in other words, as a country’s political ideology moves rightward, fewer citizens consider global warming to be a very serious problem. This relationship is most pronounced in developing countries (r = -.49), somewhat more moderate in developed countries (r = -.36), and weakest in transitioning countries (r = -.14). Because no country’s average political ideology score is below 3, the scale of these graphs is adjusted to begin with 3 rather than 0 to provide a clearer visual.
Next, in order to evaluate statistical significance and compare the relative effects of each of the factors hypothesized to influence concern for global warming, Table 2 presents a series of multilevel logistic regression models. Model results reveal a few main findings, some of which are expected and some that are somewhat surprising.
Among the findings that confirm prior research, education and political ideology are both correlated with higher levels of concern for global warming in developed countries.
Specifically, higher average levels of education and a larger share of left-leaning political sympathizers are associated with considering global warming very serious. In
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transitioning and developing countries, education is positively associated with considering global warming very serious, but political ideology has no effect.
With regards to the primary independent variables of interest, both post- materialist values and climate risk seem to have a positive effect on considering global warming very serious in developed countries. As individuals display increasingly post- materialist values, the odds of evaluating global warming to be a very serious problem increase by 11%, and the coefficient for climate risk is small but positive, suggesting that poor environmental conditions in developed countries makes it slightly more likely residents will consider global warming very serious. However, among residents of transitioning countries it appears that neither of the primary explanations tested – objective problems as measured by climate risk nor subjective values as measured by the post-materialist values index – affect concern for global warming. In developing countries, holding post-materialist values increases the odds of considering global warming very serious a marginal amount, but, as in transitioning countries, there is no effect for climate risk.
I next turn to examining the factors associated with prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. While some recent work by environmental economists has questioned the necessity of framing environmental protection in terms of mutually exclusive choices (Sachs 2008; Schor 2010), tradeoff thinking is still common among many environmentalists and policy-makers advocating for environmentally friendly policies. In these models I test the effect of the dependent variable from the previous model – considering global warming very serious – on the odds an individual will
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prioritize the environment, along with the controls for education and political ideology.
As in the previous models I also consider the effect of post-materialist values, except this time I consider the extent to which the prevalence of post-materialist values at the country level increases the extent to which environmental concern is translated into greater prioritization of the environment by including a measure of the percentage of post-materialists in a country in the analysis.
The results of these models reveal two important findings. The first is that environmental concern in the form of considering global warming very serious is highly correlated with prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. In developed countries people who consider global warming very serious are more than twice as likely to prioritize the environment. The effect is not quite as pronounced in transitioning countries, where those who consider global warming very serious are about
57% more likely to prioritize the environment over economic growth, and the effect is weaker still in developing countries, where concern for global warming only translates into a 19% increase in preferring environmental protection over economic growth. These results may reflect the more intimate and recognized relationship Guha and Martinez-
Alier (1997) have pointed out between the environment and the economy in developing as compared to developed countries, such that people in developing countries consider economic interests and environmental protection linked and thus have a more difficult time choosing which to prioritize in tradeoff scenarios.
The second important finding from these models is the positive cross-level interaction between a country’s share of citizens displaying post-materialist values and
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prioritizing the environment. This positive relationship holds in all three of the country categories, suggesting that where concern for the environment exists, the more individuals identify with post-materialist values the larger the odds they will also prioritize the environment over economic growth. The coefficient is the largest for the model of developed countries, which is unsurprising given that the theory of the effect of post-materialism on environmental concern was first formulated to apply to industrially developed countries. Model results for the effects of the predictors on the odds of prioritizing the environment in each of the country categories are presented in Table 3.
One final notable conclusion from these models is that the variance components expose substantial differences in the proportion of the variation explained by individual and country level differences for each of the dependent variables in the three development categories. There appears to be a high level of consistency among the factors motivating concern for global warming among citizens from developed countries; only 1% of the deviation in this model was attributed to differences between countries.
However, this level of consistency was not found in any of the other models. With respect to prioritizing the environment over economic growth, there were substantial differences between developed countries, with between-country variation accounting for
30% of the model variation, and in the models explaining concern for global warming in transitioning and developing countries nearly half of the model variation was accounted for by between-country differences. Overall, these findings suggest that when it comes to concern for global warming, most residents of economically developed countries with similar values and levels of education think alike, while in other parts of the world and
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when environmental protection is juxtaposed with economic growth, there is more disagreement about whether global warming is a serious problem and whether the environment should be prioritized over the economy.
Discussion
What Have We Learned About Cross-National Variation in Concern for the Environment? One conclusion of this study is that our theoretical understanding of what motivates people to be concerned about the environment is better understood for individuals in countries with more industrialized economies. Due in part to data availability and in part to researcher familiarity, the majority of existing comparative studies of cross-national differences in environmentalism focus mainly or exclusively on wealthy countries or those solidly on the path to industrialization (Asahi, 2010; Marquart-
Pyatt, 2008; Olofsson & Öhman, 2006; Skrentny, 1993; Xiao & Dunlap, 2007). This likely helps interpret why the explanatory factors tested in these models, primarily chosen based on findings from past research, were better at accounting for environmentalism in developed as compared to transitioning and developing countries, even though many studies have concluded that there is little difference in overall levels of concern for the environment (Brechin & Kempton, 1994; Dunlap & Mertig, 1997; Dunlap & Mertig,
1995; Dunlap & York, 2008). Indeed, these WVS data support the claim that general concern for the environment is fairly evenly distributed worldwide. The average percentage of citizens for whom global warming is considered to be a very serious
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problem is nearly the same in all three development categories (62% in developed countries, 60% in transitioning, and 61% in developing countries).
Probably the most unexpected finding from this analysis is that climate risk barely had an effect on concern for global warming in any economic development setting. One of the reasons this conclusion is so surprising is that this measure is based in part on how many people have died due to weather-related disasters in the last 20 years – the type of event that would seem likely to personally impact people and catalyze concern.
However, while this constitutes a fairly conclusive rejection of the objective problems explanation for this environmental issue based on these data, before throwing the idea out entirely it is useful to unpack the measure this study employs to quantify objective environmental problems, and then think more carefully about what climate risk or climate vulnerability actually entail.
The measure for objective environmental problems used here – the Climate Risk
Index – is calculated for individual countries by compiling four indices of the damaging effects of recent environmental disasters, two of which quantify the human death toll and two that tally up the countrywide economic losses from these events. A number of details about this calculation are worth considering. For example, because one of the two economic indices used to calculate risk measures impact in non-relative U.S. dollars, the adverse effects and thus risk wealthier countries face may be artificially inflated due to their larger absolute losses. A closer look at the climate risk scores reveals that many wealthy countries such as the U.S. and Italy have fairly high scores on the Climate Risk
Index, while poorer countries like Rwanda and Mali have notably low scores. These
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scores are based largely on countries’ recent experiences with natural disasters, which happen in rich as well as poor countries and are relevant for understanding risk and vulnerability to an extent. However, despite being explicitly intended to answer the question Who is Most Vulnerable? to climate change, the CRI may not measure real vulnerability in the sense of the ability to recover in the wake of a weather-related disaster very well because of its reliance on absolute economic losses (Harmeling,
2010:1). Researchers have already been critical of our scholarly ability to accurately measure or even understand vulnerability as a concept (Roberts & Parks, 2007; Watts &
Bohle, 1993). Ultimately, this measure of climate risk and its somewhat surprising lack of association with climate concern may be a reflection of this general problem.
What would likely be a more accurate quantification of climate risk and thus true climate-related vulnerability would be a measure that explicitly considers a country’s probability of experiencing high fatalities and lasting disruption when natural disasters do occur, combined with its ability to adapt to environmental and economic setbacks.
Indeed, in their 2007 study Roberts and Parks found that low national wealth and a colonial history were important predictors of what they dubbed “climate-related suffering,” which includes the proportion of a nation’s population killed, made homeless, or otherwise adversely impacted by climate-related disasters. These results imply that such factors as absolute poverty and the extent to which a country’s economy is based on certain weather-dependent exports like food might also be important to consider when evaluating a country’s overall vulnerability to the consequences of climate change.
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So if objective risk did not account for the widespread concern for global warming reported in the World Values Survey, what about the possibility that environmental concern is motivated by particular value orientations? The value measure used in these analyses, the Post-materialist Value Index, only helped account for evaluating global warming very serious in developed and developing countries, despite the fact that the average score on the Post-materialist Value Index was slightly higher in transitioning as compared to developing countries, suggesting that the lack of an effect was not due to the absence of post-materialist values in these countries. Research has suggested that cultural beliefs or value orientations are a vital part of how people think about their relationship with the natural environment (Deng, Walker, & Swinnerton,
It may just be that exactly what these environment-related cultural beliefs or subjective values entail is not yet very well understood, especially in countries in the midst of economic transition.
In fact, how modern cultural trends incorporate beliefs about the environment and evaluate environmental risks is likely to become an increasingly popular topic for future research. There is already an established tradition within the social sciences of examining the effect of shifting attitudes on political systems and social change which
The WVS has contributed a great deal to over the past 30 years, including facilitating the investigation of how certain cultural values affect modernization (Inglehart 1997) and democratization (Inglehart and Welzel 2010). Another culture-based theory gaining traction among those attempting to understand social trends related to the environment is
Sonnenfeld 2000; Spaargaren and Mol 1992). With its assumption of an increasingly reflexive and environmentally aware global civil society, ecological modernization theory suggests that shifting social values will lead to more intentionally ecologically-friendly processes of modernization (Mol and Spaargaren 2000). Many of these proposed hypotheses are still being tested, but this line of thinking will likely attract an increasing amount of attention about the impact of modern cultural values on environment concern in the coming years.
A final primary conclusion of this research is that it is appropriate – if not necessary – to study countries at different levels of economic development separately when it comes to attitudes about the environment. While for a time it was thought that public concern for the environment was higher in affluent countries, this notion has been generally discredited and some studies have even found affluence to be negatively associated with environmental concern (Dunlap & Mertig, 1995). This recognition of widespread concern for the environment in poorer countries has led to a growing body of research examining various motivations for pro-environmental attitudes and behavior around the world, which has enhanced our understanding of how people perceive and value the natural environment in different economic and cultural contexts.
In fact, the ways in which environmental issues are understood and environmental movements are formed are often quite different in developed as opposed to developing countries. Some insightful work in this area has pointed out that environmentalists in wealthy, industrialized countries typically view environmental problems as single, stand-
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alone issues (Guha & Martinez-Alier 1997). For example, saving old-growth forests and endangered species, monitoring water quality for industrial pollution and addressing climate change are considered distinct environmental problems that environmentalists in developed countries strategize to contend with one at a time. In contrast, in less economically developed countries environmental problems are much more closely connected to basic development issues and general well-being (Guha & Martinez-Alier,
1997; Martinez-Alier, 2003). As Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) explain, “in Southern movements, issues of ecology are often interlinked with questions of human rights, ethnicity and distributive justice (18).” Thus, rather than focusing primarily on wilderness conservation and the protection of nature for its own sake as environmentalists frequently do in Northern countries, environmentalism in the global South is often about preserving natural resources for the life-sustaining use of local people. Incorporating these insights into future research would likely facilitate a better understanding of environmental attitudes and concern for global warming in developing countries, and is one of the likely reasons the predictors of pro-environmental attitudes tested here worked better in models of developed as compared to transitioning or developing countries.
Conclusion
Much of the literature on cross-national variation in environmental concern has focused upon two common explanations: the objective problems thesis and the post- materialist values explanation. While both of these theories have received support in the past, the role of economic development in conditioning their relevance has been under-
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examined because of data limitations and a general unfamiliarity with the ways in which people in less developed countries interact with and think about their natural environments. This study has attempted to explicitly consider whether a country’s level of economic development affects the applicability of these established theories of environmental concern using a new measure of objective risk, the Climate Risk Index, and an established measure of subjective values, the Post-materialist Values Index. The findings suggest that the objective problems explanation of environmental concern does not apply well in any country category, but that post-materialist values do increase the odds individuals will consider global warming to be a very serious problem in some countries. The results of the other common predictors considered suggest that our understanding of how education and political ideology affect environmental concern is still somewhat underdeveloped and cannot be generalized across economic contexts.
Despite dozens of international conferences and growing urgency, a comprehensive and binding plan to address climate change has remained elusive.
Negotiating representatives at climate conferences have argued at length over countless issues, both procedural and substantive. At the most basic level, all of these disagreements boil down to global inequality. Vast disparities exist with respect to resource distribution, political power, geographic realities and social status that hasten or stall the first round of climate-related problems. Thus, one step towards climate justice is to address the historical forces that have led to such a wide divide between the haves and have-nots at the global level. As Roberts and Parks (2007) pointed out: “To understand the non-cooperative postures of developing nations, we first need to understand the
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defining features of climate change as a political issue: the unavoidably global nature of the problem, the enormous divide in responsibility for the problem, the highly asymmetric distribution of burdens and benefits associated with the warming of the earth’s climate, and inequality in who is expected to deal with its causes and consequences (9).”
However another (quite a bit easier) step towards climate justice would be to develop a better understanding of what drives concern for climate change in countries at different levels of economic development, so that future climate negotiations can be guided by the concerns of all people rather than primarily only the well-represented few.
As this study concludes, the utility of traditional explanations of environmental concern in less developed countries is mediocre, leaving considerable room for theoretical advancements that can more accurately account for the environmental attitudes of people in economically transitioning and developing countries. Given that climate scientists advise action to prevent further warming as soon as possible, and an international agreement will necessarily include countries with diverse economic realities, taking these first basic steps should be a top priority.
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List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1.
Climate Risk and Concern for Global Warming
Results from 44 Countries 100 TUR ARG
80 BFA TTO CYP CHL ESP EGYSER JPN ITA AND MLI CANURY PERMEX SWE GEO BGRMAR AUSMDA BRA 60 SVN NORJOR ETH UKR POL FIN GHA ZAF KORCHE INDVNM
ROMIDNDEUUSA 40 RWA ZMB
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
0 50 100 150 Climate Risk
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Figure 2.
Climate Risk and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developed Countries
100 80 CYP ESP JPN ITA CAN SWE AUS
60 NOR SVN FIN CHE
DEUUSA
40
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
0 50 100 150 Climate Risk
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Figure 3.
Climate Risk and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Transitioning Countries 100 TUR ARG 80 CHL SER PERMEX GEO BGR MDA BRA 60 UKR POLZAF KOR IND
ROMIDN 40
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
0 50 100 150 Climate Risk
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Figure 4.
Climate Risk and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developing Countries 100
80 BFA TTO EGY URY MLI MAR
60 JOR ETH
GHA VNM 40
RWA ZMB
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
0 50 100 150 Climate Risk
77
Figure 5.
Post-materialism and Concern for Global Warming
Results from 44 Countries 100 TUR ARG
80 BFA TTOCYP ESPCHL EGYSER JPN ITA AND MLI PERMEXURYCAN GEOBGRMARMDA AUS SWE BRA 60 SVN JORUKR ETH NOR POL GHAZAFVNMINDKOR FIN CHE
ROMIDN USA DEU 40 ZMBRWA
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
1 2 3 4 Post-materialism
78
Figure 6.
Post-materialism and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developed Countries
100 80 CYP ESP JPN ITA AND CAN AUS SWE
60 SVN NOR FIN CHE
USA DEU
40
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
1 2 3 4 Post-materialism
79
Figure 7.
Post-materialism and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Transitioning Countries 100 TUR ARG 80 CHL SER PERMEX GEOBGR MDA BRA 60 UKR ZAFINDKORPOL
ROMIDN 40
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
1 2 3 4 Post-materialism
80
Figure 8.
Post-materialism and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developing Countries 100
80 BFA EGY TTO URY MARMLI
60 JOR ETH
GHAVNM 40
ZMBRWA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
1 2 3 4 Post-materialism
81
Figure 9.
Education and Concern for Global Warming
Results from 44 Countries 100 TUR ARG
80 BFA ESPTTOCHL CYP EGY SER ITAAND JPN MLI URY MEXPER CAN MAR BGRMDA GEOAUSSWE BRA 60 SVN ETH JOR NORUKR POL GHA VNMIND FINZAF CHE KOR
DEUROM USA IDN 40 RWA ZMB
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Education
82
Figure 10.
Education and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developed Countries
100 80 ESP CYP ITAAND JPN CAN AUSSWE
60 SVN NOR FIN CHE
DEU USA
40
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Education
83
Figure 11.
Education and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Transitioning Countries 100 TUR ARG 80 CHL SER MEXPER BGRMDA GEO BRA 60 UKR IND POLZAF KOR
ROM IDN 40
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Education
84
Figure 12.
Education and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developing Countries 100
80 BFA EGYTTO URY MARMLI
60 ETH JOR
GHA VNM 40
RWA ZMB
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Education
85
Figure 13.
Political Ideology and Concern for Global Warming
Results from 44 Countries 100 TUR ARG
80 BFA ESP CYPCHL TTO EGYANDITA JPN SER URYCANMLIPER MEX BGR AUSSWEMARMDAGEO BRA 60 SVN NORUKRJOR ETH POL IND CHEFINKOR ZAFGHA VNM
DEU USAROM IDN 40 RWA ZMB
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Political Ideology
86
Figure 14.
Political Ideology and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developed Countries
100 80 ESP CYP ANDITA JPN CAN AUSSWE
60 SVNNOR CHEFIN
DEU USA
40
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Political Ideology
87
Figure 15.
Political Ideology and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Transitioning Countries 100 TUR ARG 80 CHL SER PER MEX BGR MDAGEO BRA 60 UKR IND KORPOL ZAF
ROM IDN 40
THA
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Political Ideology
88
Figure 16.
Political Ideology and Concern for Global Warming
Results from Developing Countries 100
80 BFA EGY TTO URY MLIMAR
60 JOR ETH
GHA VNM 40
RWA ZMB
20
Global Warming Very Serious Warming Very Global 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Political Ideology
89
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics and Metrics of Variables VARIABLE METRIC DEVELOPED TRANSITIONING DEVELOPING Mean(SD) Mean(SD) Mean(SD) Dependent Measures Global 1 = yes .62(.49) .60(.49) .61(.49) Warming Very Serious
Prioritize 1=yes .64(.48) .53(.50) .48(.50) Environmental Protection over
Economic Growth Independent Measures Post- 0-5, 0 = 2.53(1.25) 1.96(1.12) 1.80(1.09) materialist materialist, to Values 5 = post- materialist Education 1-9, 1=no 6.18(2.19) 5.64(2.36) 4.38(2.47) educ. 9=univ. deg. Political 1-10, 1 = 5.24(2.05) 5.89(2.35) 5.90(2.78) Ideology right to 10 = left Climate Risk 1 = 151.75 83.74(39.87) 88.46(17.89) 55.32(32.72) N = countries 14 18 12 N= obs. 11,884 15,347 10,204 Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey
90
Table 2. Coefficients and Odds Ratios of Multilevel Logistic Regression Models Predicting Evaluating Global Warming Very Serious by Country Category Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Developed Transitioning Developing
Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio
Individual-level Measures Post-materialist .10*** 1.11 -.01 .99 .08** 1.08 values (.02) (.02) (.02) Education .04*** 1.04 .12*** 1.13 .06*** 1.06 (.01) (.01) (.01) Political -.11*** .90 -.01 .99 .02† 1.02 Ideology (.01) (.01) (.01) Constant .67*** .39* .41 (.14) (.18) (.20) Country-level Measures Intercept .09 .71 .70 (.15) (.14) (.16) Climate Risk .01 .000 .000 (.01) (.02) (.01) -2LogL -7549.24*** -8573.09*** -6246.48*** AIC 15110.48 17158.18 12504.96 BIC 15154.77 17203.39 12548.34 N= countries 14 18 12 N= obs. 11,884 15,347 10,204 Variance Measures Within-country 38% 32% 37% variation Between- 1% 50% 49% country variation Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey †p<.10 *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means.
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Table 3: Coefficients and Odds Ratios of Multilevel Logistic Regression Models Predicting Prioritizing Environmental Protection over Economic Growth by Country Category Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Developed Transitioning Developing Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio Individual-level Measures Global Warming .69*** 1.99 .38*** 1.46 .17*** 1.19 Very Serious (.04) (.04) (.04) Education .08*** 1.08 .02** 1.02 .01 1.01 (.01) (.01) (.01) Political -.09*** .91 -.02* .98 -.00 1 Ideology (.01) (.01) (.01) Constant .23*** -.02 -.13 (.15) (.11) (.13) Country-level Measures Intercept .55 .45 .44 (.11) (.08) (.09) Post-materialist .27 .12 .19 values (.05) (.03) (.05) -2LogL -6960.07*** -10068.68*** -6793.70*** AIC 13932.14 20149.36 13599.41 BIC 13976.44 20195.20 13642.79 N= countries 14 18 12 N= obs. 11,884 15,347 10,204 Variance Measures Within-country 41% 28% 23% variation Between-country 30% 20% 19% variation Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey † p<.10 *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means.
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Appendix
The Climate Risk Index
The Climate Risk Index (CRI) is an aggregated measure of a country’s relative vulnerability to climate change compared to other countries on four indicators: number of deaths, number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, sum of losses in US$ in purchasing power parity (PPP), and losses per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The measure is quantified as a scale from 0 to 151.75, with a CRI of one being the most at-risk country. For the purposes of these analyses I reversed the scale of the CRI so that higher numbers indicated a higher level of risk for ease of interpretation. Thus, the scores below for each country in the analysis reflect this reversed coding scheme. The scores for the countries analyzed, in order from most to least vulnerable, are below.
CRI Country
132.92 Vietnam
125.92 India
121.5 Italy
116.25 Spain
115.25 USA
113.83 Germany
112.58 Indonesia
109.17 Switzerland
106.92 Mexico
93
104.42 Romania
102.5 South Korea
98.83 Thailand
97.83 Peru
96.75 Slovenia
94.17 Moldova
88.75 Australia
82.83 Argentina
82.17 Ukraine
81.75 South Africa
81.42 Poland
78.5 Japan
76.17 Morocco
75 Zambia
71.08 Ethiopia
70.67 Brazil
69.67 Turkey
68.92 Bulgaria
68.75 Chile
63.58 Uruguay
63.17 Canada
56.67 Georgia
94
53.08 Cyprus
51.17 Serbia
48.75 Egypt
44.5 Burkina Faso
37.17 Ghana
36.42 Sweden
33.33 Jordan
32.75 Rwanda
29.08 Norway
13.75 Trinidad Tobago
3.83 Finland
1 Mali
World Values Survey Variables
V104. Here are two statements people sometimes make when discussing the environment and economic growth. Which of them comes closer to your own point of view?
1 Protecting the environment should be given priority, even if it causes
slower economic growth and some loss of jobs.
2 Economic growth and creating jobs should be the top priority, even if the
environment suffers to some extent.
95
Now let’s consider environmental problems in the world as a whole. Please, tell me how serious you consider each of the following to be for the world as a whole. Is it very serious, somewhat serious, not very serious or not serious at all?
V111. Global warming or the greenhouse effect.
1 Very Serious
2 Somewhat Serious
3 Not very serious
4 Not serious at all
V114. In political matters, people talk of “the left” and “the right.” How would you place your views on this scale, generally speaking?
Left Right
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V238. What is the highest educational level that you have attained?
1 No formal education
2 Incomplete primary school
3 Complete primary school
4 Incomplete secondary school: technical/vocational type
5 Complete secondary school: technical/vocational type
6 Incomplete secondary: university-preparatory type
7 Complete secondary: university-preparatory type
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8 Some university-level education, without degree
9 University-level education, with degree
The exact wording of the variable measuring the post-materialist value index is not included in the codebook for the 2005-2008 World Values Survey.
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APPENDIX B – WORLD CITIZENSHIP AND CONCERN FOR GLOBAL WARMING: BUILDING THE CASE FOR A STRONG INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY
Paper is pending publication in Social Forces
Abstract
Climate change shares many characteristics with classic social dilemmas. Social psychological studies of social dilemmas have found that individuals who identify as members of social groups are more likely to cooperate with other group members. Using multilevel models and the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey, I test the effect of four social identities – world citizen, national citizen, local community member, and autonomous individual – on the odds an individual considers global warming a very serious problem. I find that identification as a world citizen increases the odds an individual judges global warming very serious, but only for individuals who also identify as autonomous individuals. I argue that awareness of the individual and collective nature of environmental risks may strengthen efforts to promote ecological citizenship.
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Introduction
A controversial proposition in contemporary environmental sociology is that humans have the potential to reflexively adapt our behavior to comply with earth’s biophysical constraints. This is among the more optimistic outlooks in the debate between those who take a treadmill of production perspective and see the modern industrial world as careening towards ecological destruction (Foster 1992; Schnaiberg
1980) and those who favor the ecological modernization view that modern institutions are flexible enough to transition toward sustainability (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000; Spaargaren and Mol 1992; Spaargaren 2000). While both of these perspectives have case-specific supporting empirical evidence (Pellow, Schnaiberg and Weinberg 2000; Mol 1995), the most interesting research relevant to this debate lies between the extremes. With regards to the environment-society relationship, the more fruitful task is not to prove either perspective “right,” but to identify the conditions under which the predictions made by both are more or less likely (Fisher and Freudenburg 2001:704).
Ecological modernization as a whole has come under substantial criticism for being an insufficiently developed social theory (Buttel 2000), for assuming economic development and ecological sustainability are potentially compatible goals under the current economic system (Schnaiberg and Gould 2000; York and Rosa 2003), and for promoting a type of “new human exemptionalism,” which rests on much-critiqued assumptions about the superiority of humans over nature due to our technology (Foster
2012). However, one interesting component of an ecological modernization perspective is the role of a reflexive, aware public – an idea introduced to modernization studies by
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Beck, Giddens and Lash’s (1994) theory of reflexive modernization. Reflexive modernization suggests humans today are entering into a second modernity that will differ significantly from our current modernity and its focus on industrialization. Among this new modernity’s defining characteristics are new technologies that facilitate economic and cultural globalization and information delivery, reflexivity based on informed self-interest, an awareness of environmental problems and a shift toward more flexible, inclusive social and political institutions (Bauman 2000; Beck et al. 1994; Beck,
Bonss and Lau 2003). Beck et al. (2003) predict that this reflexive modernization will shift the foundational principles and institutions of a rapidly changing modern world in new directions.
Reflexive modernization theory rests on some optimistic assumptions about the potential for widespread bottom-up social change to transform environmental political decision-making for which there is certainly room for skepticism. Neoliberal logic is still firmly embedded within global environmental governance as it is currently structured
(Gareau 2008; Goldman 2005), and studies have found citizen activism is often either ineffective against these entrenched institutions (Fisher 2010) or inadvertently reinforces neoliberal structural relations by using mainstream economic values to frame global environmental problems and their solutions (Gareau 2012; Goldman 2001). Moreover, even among the modernization perspectives there is disagreement about whether a move toward ecological sustainability will require transformative structural changes in the state or civil society; a reflexive modernization view assumes foundational changes are necessary and that citizen participation in new social movements (NSMs) will be crucial
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(Beck et al. 1994), while ecological modernizationists imagine achieving sustainability primarily through reform rather than major upheaval (Buttel 2000).
What virtually all of these scholars do agree on is that the environmental challenges we face are serious, especially scientists’ predictions about long-term changes in global climate. Atmospheric CO2 concentration levels are expected to double from 250 to about 500 parts per million by mid-century, causing massive global warming (IPCC
2007). The consequences of these climatic changes will be ecologically diverse and are likely to accelerate with time as processes of warming feed forward. In fact, the effects of climate change are already severe. A 2011 report published by the World Health
Organization estimated global warming causes approximately 150,000 deaths annually while a 2012 report by the Climate Vulnerability Forum estimated the annual death toll to be as high as 400,000. Scientists also predict a wide spectrum of health risks – infectious diseases, thermal stress, hunger – due to environmental disruptions will emerge as the planet continues to warm (McMichael, Woodruff and Hales 2006). Negotiating life in the face of earth’s rapidly changing natural conditions will likely be humanity’s greatest challenge in the coming decades.
Thus, while the debate over whether the modern economic system is fundamentally at odds with sustainability is ongoing, suggestions for facilitating a shift toward environmental sustainability are attracting attention. A body of relatively recent work explores the concept of citizenship to help explain the process by which people make environmentally-relevant decisions (Dobson 2003; Jagers 2009). In particular, scholars have introduced the notion of ecological citizenship to outline how values best
101 suited for realizing a sustainable society develop (Carter 2007; Dobson 2007). Green political theorists have also emphasized the importance of democratic citizenship and the internalization of prosocial normative orientations for realizing common goals (Barry
1996). Some of the theoretical propositions implicit in this emphasis on citizenship have been tested by sociological research on social dilemmas. For example, social psychologists have found that shared social identities increase the probability individuals will behave cooperatively rather than out of self-interest (Brewer and Silver 2000; Tajfel
1982). Together these ideas suggest a collective social identity, especially one combined with notions of citizenship such as a world citizenship identity, could increase support for an international civil society more focused on addressing shared environmental problems.
The proposition that humans are reflexive enough to recognize impending problems, capable of reaching a moral consensus, or cooperative enough to translate consensus into specific collective action is undeniably controversial. However, occasional events in human history – the abolition of slavery in the United States, the drafting of the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals – suggest that reflexivity and collective morality do exist and can, under the right circumstances, redirect social policy. The challenge is to determine the conditions under which such collective shifts in moral values achieve enough momentum to generate change.
In this paper I examine how different citizenship identities affect evaluations about the seriousness of global warming. After a brief review of the literature on individual predictors of environmental concern, I outline how climate change resembles a social dilemma and suggest that conceptualizing it as such might offer insight into how to
102 improve cooperation. I draw on the concept of reflexivity to develop my argument, along with theories of ecological citizenship and cooperative collective action to propose social identification as a world citizen as one psychological mechanism that affects how humans evaluate collective environmental problems. Using the 2005-2008 wave of the World
Values Survey (WVS), I first propose and test the hypothesis that personal identification as a world citizen increases the probability an individual will evaluate global warming as very serious. I then compare how world citizenship identification affects concern for global warming among residents of Annex I countries (the countries designated as primarily responsible for climate change by the Kyoto Protocol and therefore advised to reduce emissions) and Non-Annex I countries (those nations recognized as having less historical responsibility for climate change and thus without current emissions reductions recommendations). If holding a world citizen identity does increase the odds an individual considers global warming very serious, promotion of a world citizenship identity could be one positive step toward reaching a cooperative international action plan on climate.
Theoretical Argument
Environmental Concern among Individuals
Environmental sociology has given considerable attention to identifying the demographic and social psychological bases of pro-environmental attitudes and behavior.
Sociologists associate younger age, female sex, left political ideology, and education with environmentalism and environmental concern (Dunlap and McCright 2008; Jones and
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Dunlap 1992; Kemmelmeier, Krol and Kim 2002; McCright and Dunlap 2011; Van Liere and Dunlap 1980; Zelezny, Chua and Aldrich 2000). Explanations for these relationships highlight youth participation in political movements, gender socialization that links women with nature and nurturance, the political right’s aversion to environmental regulations, and education’s impact on knowledge of social and environmental issues.
However, much of this research has equated environmental concern with environmental behaviors and activism, has paid too little attention to theory development and testing theoretical propositions with empirical data, or has focused on narrow geographical areas.
Thus, despite substantial work examining environmental concern, there remains much to be discovered about how individuals assign value to the natural environment.
Social Dilemmas
Of all the global environmental problems facing humanity today, climate change is the most ecologically complex. It is also, in many ways, a social dilemma. Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests conflict with individual interests
(Kollock 1998; Simpson 2006). The most defining property of a social dilemma is when, given a range of behavioral choices, the action most beneficial to the individual causes harm to the collective. Currently, many behaviors – driving cars, heating and cooling homes, eating food grown on the other side of the planet – are convenient and inexpensive for the individual in the neoliberal economy, but contribute to collective environmental problems like climate change (Foster 2009; Magdoff and Foster 2011).
Solving social dilemmas requires learning how to act cooperatively to protect collective interests over individual interests.
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One important difference of many environmental social dilemmas compared to prototypical social dilemmas is that they are asymmetric resource social dilemmas, or dilemmas involving common resources in which the costs and benefits of the resource’s depletion are distributed unequally (Eek, Biel and Gärling 2001). This situation is common among urban environmental problems. With respect to the siting of polluting industrial facilities, Bullard (2000) found that communities comprised largely of racial minority or low-income residents are much more likely to have toxic waste-producing facilities nearby. On a global scale climate justice scholars are articulating similar arguments, suggesting that the burdens of emitting high amounts of greenhouse gases
(GHGs) harms some individuals, such as residents of environmentally and economically vulnerable countries, more than others (Roberts and Parks 2007). In these cases, the conflicting interests that make up the social dilemma are better characterized as between the disadvantaged majority and the privileged few.
There is a history of opposition to environmental inequalities, and the environmental justice movement has had some success. Citizens against Nuclear Trash
(CANT) prevented Louisiana Energy Services’ plans to build a uranium enrichment plant in Louisiana, leading to legislation in the U.S. requiring environmental impact assessments that consider disproportionate race and class effects of proposed industrial activity (Bullard 2000, 2005). Climate justice advocates have also made the “polluter pays principle” a part of climate negotiations (Roberts and Parks 2007), and talks are in progress to design a Green Climate Fund to facilitate financial transfers from rich to poor countries (Brown 2012). Of course, there are still substantial institutional barriers that
105 limit the capacity of ordinary citizens and environmental justice activists to significantly reduce environmental pollution (Gareau 2012; Gould, Schnaiberg and Weinberg 1996).
Plus, many of the alleged successes of the U.S. environmental justice movement have been in securing funds for relocation away from polluted areas rather than preventing the pollution in the first place (Bullard 2000). But given these powerful institutional forces aligned against citizen influence, a strong democratic civil society may be especially important. Indeed, Brulle (2010) has argued that such a society, along with a well- developed communication system, is crucial for realizing environmental justice.
Social Identity and Ecological Citizenship
One mechanism scholars associate with cooperative, prosocial behavior – a likely precondition for a strong civil society – is personal identification with relevant groups.
Specifically, studies have found that people often cooperate when their actions will help individuals with whom they identify (Brewer and Kramer 1986; Brewer and Silver 2000;
Tajfel 1982). It may be that individuals who share a common social identity are more concerned with other group members’ interests because they consider them linked to their own, even interchangeable. It may also be that generosity is triggered when people feel a personal connection with others. An empirical example attributed to this phenomenon is the finding by poverty scholars that the public is more supportive of redistributive social welfare policies in more racially homogenous areas (Alesina and Glaeser 2004).
The connection between social identities and cooperative behavior is also fundamental to conceptions of citizenship. Writing about the role of citizenship for achieving sustainability through green democratic politics, John Barry defined citizenship
106 as the “mediating practice which connects the individual and the institutional levels of society, as well as a common identity which links otherwise disparate individuals together as a collectivity with common interests” (Barry 1996:123). Habermas (1993) argued that the building blocks of a democratic and sustainable society are citizens with the capacity for moral reasoning, a well-developed set of ecological ethics, and the ability to recognize how their actions impact others. Andrew Dobson (2003) suggested that the realization of an ecologically sustainable civil society depends heavily upon the presence of these types of people, whom he labels “ecological citizens.” Among some green theorists, ecological or environmental citizenship is considered an essential prerequisite for a sustainable society (Barry 1996; Carter 2007; Dobson 2007). The importance of an environmental consciousness has even been likened to an “ecological social contract,” in which ecological citizens would consider a commitment to environmental sustainability a requirement for participation in civil society for the same reasons citizens agreed to follow society’s rules in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s original social contract (Barry 1996).
In fact, definitions of social identity and citizenship are very similar. Henri Tajfel, the scholar who originally formulated social identity theory, defined social identity as
“that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1982:225). The distinguishing feature of both social identity and citizenship is thus a personally meaningful connection between an individual and a social group. Conceptually then, the connection with shared interests that citizenship implies could be reasonably expected to have the same effect on
107 cooperative behavior as other forms of social identity. Indeed, citizenship as a social identity has a number of additional characteristics that make it likely to reinforce mutually beneficial behavior, including group solidarity and some minimum amount of responsibility and awareness.
Social Identity and Public Opinion
In 1951 Nelson Foote published his classic article, “Identification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation,” laying out a theory of how identity is a fundamental factor in how humans interpret situations, form opinions, and behave. Specifically, Foote argued that identity is the content that drives behavior, without which meaning is absent (Foote
1951:16). This puts identity rather than a consideration of information before behavior and opinion – an idea that has been tested and supported in a variety of contexts (Brooks and Manza 1997; Kahan et al. 2007), including in the specific case of concern for global warming (McCright and Dunlap 2011). Moreover, within social movement research, social identities are well-known as the basis of many social movements, including the civil rights and women’s movements, suggesting that collective identities frequently shape attitudes and behavior that pertain to political issues (Bernstein 2005).
A particular empirical case that illustrates identity prompting opinions regarding global warming is the extreme polarization on this issue recently witnessed between those who identify as Democrats versus Republicans in the United States. In the 1960s and 70s, support for environmental protection was relatively non-partisan. However, beginning in the early 1980s, individuals self-identifying as politically conservative or Republican have become much less supportive of policies to protect the environment and address
108 climate change, with polarization widening in the last 15 years, especially among political elites and extreme partisans (Dunlap and McCright 2008; Hart and Nisbet 2012).
Public opinion polls plainly demonstrate this trend: In 1998, 23% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans reported thinking that news of global warming was “exaggerated,” whereas by 2012, 20% of Democrats and 67% of Republicans said the same (Saad 2012).
A similar divergence is seen in overall concern for global warming depending on political identity, with 47% of Democrats and 46% Republicans reporting general concern about global warming in 1998 while in Gallup’s most recent poll, these numbers had shifted to
74% of Democrats and 34% Republicans reporting concern about global warming
(Dunlap 2008; Newport 2012). McCright and Dunlap (2011) argue that this divergence appears to be the result of changes in Republican rhetoric, clearly embraced by many citizens who identify as Republican, rather than changes in scientific consensus or knowledge about global warming, which has only increased over this time period (IPCC
2007).
In addition to the obstacle of political polarization, there is also fear that recognizing environmental threats simply does not produce cooperative behavior. In his
2007 book Shopping Our Way to Safety, Andrew Szasz suggests that fear of environmental contaminants is causing people to turn inward and away from collective action. Szasz argues that responding to perceived environmental problems by turning to green consumerism actually reduces support for environmental protection as people focus on self-protection rather than cooperative mobilization – a phenomenon he labels the
“inverted quarantine” (Szasz 2007). This perspective implies that we may find no
109 relationship between collective social identities and concern for global warming, or that we may actually find greater concern among those who perceive themselves as on their own against an increasingly polluted world.
In the following analysis I employ international survey data to test the relationships between citizenship identifications and evaluations about the seriousness of global warming. I also compare people in industrialized, Annex I countries and in less industrially developed, Non-Annex I countries to determine whether any correlations are stronger among residents of countries with higher historical GHG emissions. That Annex
I residents might feel more responsible for global climate change, particularly those who identify as world citizens and thus may be more likely to acknowledge the interdependence of human well-being worldwide, is a plausible possibility from an ecological citizenship perspective, which encourages individuals to consider the morality of their environmental footprints.
Critics may assume that the category “world citizen” is too broad to constitute social group identification, but in fact it satisfies all of the criteria laid out by Turner
(1985) in his social cognitive theory of group behavior. In this influential work, Turner outlined three basic criteria necessary for group identification to be activated. First, individuals need to perceive themselves as members of a distinct social group. Second, they must be interdependent for the satisfaction of their mutual needs. Finally, over time a relatively stable and organized social structure needs to develop governed by shared norms and values (Turner 1985:79). World citizenship as a social category meets all of these requirements: human beings do identify as such, our sense of interdependence has
110 intensified as our world becomes increasingly globalized, and international political entities have at least attempted to develop widely agreed upon human rights schemas such as the United Nations with the Millenium Development Goals.
Data and Methods
Data
Data for this study come from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey
(WVS) – the most recent data from this survey series available. The WVS is a large data collection effort undertaken every five to six years by an international network of social scientists for the purpose of accumulating information about basic social and political values among residents of countries around the world. Many social scientific studies have employed the WVS. It is especially well-known in research on how cultural values affect economic development and democracy and country level variation in happiness. It has also been used to study environmental attitudes, generating a lengthy debate about the post-materialist values or affluence thesis of environmental concern. Using data from the
WVS some scholars have argued that affluence is positively associated with environmental concern (Duroy 2008; Inglehart 1995; Kidd and Lee 1997) while other scholars, using the WVS and other data, have disputed these results and argued that citizen concern for environmental problems is widespread in poorer countries and is not dependent on affluence or post-materialist values (Brechin and Kempton 1994; Dunlap and York 2008; Givens and Jorgenson 2011). A recent study using WVS data finds that a large majority of people in all countries are concerned about global warming, but also
111 finds post-materialist values to be positively correlated with concern (Kvaløy, Finseraas and Listhaug 2012). My paper builds on these studies by introducing identification as a world citizen as a new predictor of pro-environmental attitudes and by extending sociological theory about what motivates concern for global environmental problems with theoretical insights from social psychology.
Large cross-national datasets like the WVS do have limitations. For one, the standardized nature of survey questions makes it difficult to interpret the behind-the- scenes mental thought processes motivating certain answers, especially when question meaning may differ somewhat in diverse economic, cultural, and political contexts.
Further, there is the possibility that nonrandom variation exists in the type of countries that opt in to such a survey rendering the results unrepresentative of other countries with seemingly similar characteristics. However, some of these limitations – the standardization of questions, the diversity of respondents – also make large cross-national surveys useful tools for comparative research, especially when statistical methods such as multilevel models are employed to help identify variation at the different levels.
Fifty-seven countries participated in the 2005-2008 wave of the WVS, though some countries employed a reduced version. These include both Annex I countries, defined as industrialized countries with established emissions reductions targets under the
Kyoto Protocol, and Non-Annex I countries, or those without emissions reductions recommendations. The Annex I countries include Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland,
Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Rwanda, Serbia, South
Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Zambia.
Dependent Variable
To analyze concern for global warming I employ the variable from the fifth wave of the WVS that asks: “Please tell me how serious you consider global warming or the greenhouse effect to be for the world as a whole?” In the survey, the response choices included four categories: very serious, somewhat serious, not very serious, and not serious at all. For the purpose of this analysis I collapse these responses into a dichotomous variable coded one if the respondent chose “very serious.” Overall, a substantial majority of all respondents in the survey (89%) expressed the opinion that global warming is at least somewhat serious, while a smaller proportion (60%) chose the more extreme category “very serious.” I chose to model the odds an individual selected the response category “very serious” to get a better distribution on the dependent variable and focus on individuals who clearly regard global warming as a critical problem.
Independent Variables
The primary independent variables of interest are four social identification categories – world citizen, national citizen, member of local community, and autonomous individual – with which respondents could choose whether or not to identify. The answer categories included “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree,” for each citizenship identity, providing insight into how respondents view themselves in the
113 context of possible social groups. Figure 1 provides a visual representation of the proportion of respondents identifying (by choosing either “strongly agree” or “agree”) with each of these social categories. The majority of individuals polled identified as citizens of their respective countries and members of their local communities, with very little variation between Annex I and Non-Annex I countries. On average, the majority of respondents also identified as world citizens and autonomous individuals, but more variation existed between the country categories on these measures, with fewer residents of Annex I countries considering themselves world citizens and more identifying as autonomous individuals compared to Non-Annex I residents.
A number of factors, including left-wing political ideology (Jagers 2009;
McCright and Dunlap 2011; Olofsson and Öhman 2006), educational attainment
(McCright and Dunlap 2011; Olofsson and Öhman 2006), age (Jones and Dunlap 1992;
Van Liere and Dunlap 1980) and female sex (Alibeli and Johnson 2009; Zelezny et al.
2000; Olofsson and Öhman 2006) have been repeatedly established as positively associated with concern for the environment. Thus, I control for these characteristics to determine whether citizenship identities are correlated with concern for global warming beyond that which is accounted for by these common predictors. I code left-wing political ideology on a scale of one to 10, with one representing the most right-wing political views and 10 the most left-wing (respondents in China and Malaysia were not asked about political ideology). Educational attainment is measured by a nine category ascending scale, with one indicating no formal education and nine indicating a university level education, with degree. Sex is coded as a dummy variable, with female coded as
114 one and male zero. Age is coded in years. Descriptive statistics for all variables are presented in Table 1.
As a visual depiction of country-level differences in relative contributions to global warming, Figure 2 graphs per capita CO2 emissions by country. These data were obtained from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), a respected source of carbon dioxide emissions data supported by the United States Department of
Energy’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Division. Because the WVS was conducted between the years 2005-2008, I constructed an average of the per capita CO2 emissions for each country for these four years to create a measure that best represents the likely emissions context within which a survey respondent was living at the time of their participation. Overall, substantial variation exists in per capita CO2 emissions among the sampled countries. In the Annex I countries, the United States had the highest per capita CO2 emissions, with about 5.05 metric tons of CO2 emitted annually per citizen, with Australia and Canada close behind. Most of the other Annex I countries are
European countries, which on average emit half or less per capita CO2.
Substantial variation also exists among Non-Annex I countries. These countries do not have binding emissions reductions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, though some of them actually emitted more CO2 per capita over the 2005-2008 period than some
Annex I countries. However, most of these countries’ emissions were very low, and half were measured at less than 1 annual metric ton of CO2 per capita between 2005 and 2008.
Some of the African countries, such as Zambia, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Ethiopia and
Mali, emitted .05 tons of per capita CO2 or less.
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Methods
To analyze these data I use multilevel logistic regression models, the statistical method ideal for explaining both within and between country differences (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002). These models examine whether or not individuals evaluate global warming to be very serious, as well as the net influence of the primary predictors of interest beyond what can be attributed to variation between countries. At Level-1 are the individual variables, including citizenship identities, political ideology, educational attainment, age and sex. At Level-2 are the country clusters and the measure of average per capita CO2 emissions. Because these data are structured such that individual responses are nested within countries, multilevel models are preferred because they can correct for potentially biased standard errors due to the dependence of the individual- level variables on country of residence (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002).
As in most surveys, some sampled respondents did not answer all of the questions asked, creating some incidences of missing data. However, the majority of respondents did answer all of the questions used in this analysis, and running the models with and without the observations in which some of the data were missing produced substantively identical results. In the analyses presented I include only cases in which all of the variables had values in order to maximize comparability between models, with the exception of observations from China and Malaysia which are included even without responses for the political ideology variable.
Results
116
Table 2 presents logistic regression coefficients and standard errors, as well as calculated odds ratios for the odds of evaluating global warming to be a very serious problem. In the following analysis I discuss the findings as odds ratios – values that can be calculated by exponentiating the raw logistic regression coefficients – to facilitate substantive interpretation. In Model 1, which includes the responses of Annex I residents only, the odds world citizens evaluate global warming a very serious problem are 1.3 times higher than those who do not identify as world citizens. The odds autonomous individuals consider global warming very serious are also 1.19 times higher. In Model 2, which depicts the responses from Non-Annex I residents, world citizens have 1.17 higher odds of considering global warming very serious, and autonomous individuals 1.23 greater odds. Model 2 also finds that respondents identifying as local community members have lower odds (.87) of evaluating global warming as very serious. Countries’ per capita CO2 emissions are negatively associated with evaluations of global warming among Annex I countries.
Model 3 in Table 2 represents the full model predicting evaluations of global warming with all countries included. Here, world citizenship maintains its association with attitudes about global warming, increasing the odds of considering global warming very serious by 1.23. Notably, along with those identifying as world citizens, identifying as an autonomous individual have 1.17 greater odds of evaluating global warming very serious. Further, three of the included controls – left political ideology, education and female – are also associated with concern for global warming. Moving leftward on the political ideology scale is associated with a 1.03 increase in the odds of evaluating global
117 warming very serious for each additional step left. Educational attainment, measured categorically, is also associated with 1.08 greater odds one will consider global warming very serious. The odds females express concern about global warming is 1.08 times higher, though the comparison models reveal that this effect is based solely on females of
Annex I countries where the odds of considering global warming very serious are 1.30 times higher for females while there is no difference between males and females in Non-
Annex I countries. Despite conventional wisdom from past research suggesting that environmental concern is more prevalent among younger cohorts (Jones and Dunlap
1992; Van Liere and Dunlap 1980), the coefficient for age is not significant in any of the models. Per capita CO2 is positively associated with concern for global warming in the full model with all 43 countries.
In order to shed more light on the somewhat surprising finding that both world citizenship and identifying as an autonomous individual are positively correlated with concern for global warming, Table 3 presents a typology of the effect of the four possible combinations of these two citizenship categories on evaluations of global warming. These combinations include respondents identifying as both world citizens and autonomous individuals, world citizens but not autonomous individuals, autonomous individuals but not world citizens, and neither world citizens nor autonomous individuals. Results reveal that the only combination positively related to concern for global warming is identification as both a world citizen and an autonomous individual. The odds people in this category evaluate global warming very serious is 1.26 times greater compared to those who are not. Interestingly, people who identify only as world citizens, autonomous
118 individuals, or neither world citizens nor autonomous individuals actually have significantly lower odds of considering global warming very serious. This leads to the unexpected conclusion that the combination of identifying as both world citizen and autonomous individual is the unique citizenship recipe associated with higher levels of concern for global warming.
Discussion and Conclusions
This study identifies patterns between citizenship identities and concern for global warming, finding that simultaneously identifying as a world citizen and an autonomous individual increases the odds a person will consider global warming a very serious problem. Evidence from social psychological research on the linkage between shared social identities and cooperative behavior provide a theoretical explanation for part of this finding, suggesting that when people identify as members of social groups they are more likely to behave in ways that take into account their group members’ outcomes as well as their own (Brewer and Silver 2000; Tajfel 1982).
The other part of this finding is more difficult to account for, as it seems somewhat opposite to the shared social identities explanation. However, a combination of
Andrew Szasz’s inverted quarantine and Ulrich Beck’s risk society theses may help untangle the puzzle. Beck and his coauthors (Beck et al. 1994; Beck et al. 2003) argue that the mistrust and dissatisfaction brought on by recognizing the risks of living in the modern world are likely to result in a reflexive modernization, wherein people focus on reforming harmful practices in light of new information, potentially by coordinating with
119 other like-minded individuals. In his book Szasz found that people frequently turn to buying products perceived as “green” upon recognizing their constant exposure to dangerous toxins, but expressed fear that these individualized responses would undermine cooperative efforts to address environmental contamination rather than spur organized social responses (Szasz 2007:3). However, it may be that people can concurrently recognize the individual and communal consequences of environmental problems, and that the fear of being on our own in an increasingly polluted world combined with a sense of interconnectedness with other humans about our shared plight is the most galvanizing awareness of all.
In many ways, this finding actually reinforces the importance of developing a concept of ecological citizenship, as people struggle to make choices with asymmetrical cost-benefit structures. Within the field of green political theory a growing number of scholars are outlining what it means to be an ecological citizen in the modern world, and how our choices affect collective efforts to achieve more sustainable society-environment relationships (Barry 1996; Carter 2007; Dobson 2003, 2007). Environmental psychologists have also found that value orientations are important predictors of environmental behavior, reinforcing the idea that normative considerations are part of the process of environmental decision-making (de Groot and Steg 2010). Of course, because research is mixed about the potential for public pressure to change environmentally- relevant decisions at the global level given current power structures, it is too soon to predict how a large base of environmentally-oriented individuals might change the
120 landscape of the global environmental movement. But at the very least, without a growing base of ecological citizens such changes are even less likely.
Another noteworthy finding is that there is little difference between residents of
Annex I and Non-Annex I countries with respect to the citizenship identities positively associated with concern for global warming. Based on the logic of differential responsibility for CO2 emissions, I expected that a world citizen orientation may be more correlated with concern for global warming among residents of countries with higher levels of responsibility for the problem. In fact, we do see a slightly reversed relationship between the individual and collective citizenship identifications and concern for global warming in Non-Annex I countries as compared to Annex I countries. In Non-Annex I countries the autonomous individual identification has a slightly stronger positive effect on concern for global warming as compared to the world citizen measure, with the opposite being true of residents of Annex I countries. It is nonetheless interesting that the same combination of concurrent individual and collective identifications increase concern for global warming in both country categories. This suggests these findings may be more a result of basic awareness about the problems associated with climate change than a manifestation of any personal feelings of responsibility. It also highlights the possibility for a global ecological citizenship, wherein the recognition of ecological limits, individual risk, and a sense of ourselves as world citizens on a finite planet could be common ground upon which to build support for united efforts to solve global warming.
The theoretical work linking our reflexive selves and our interdependent global world is already in progress. Anthony Giddens, writing about “life politics” in the
121 modern era, suggests that individuals increasingly understand their personal choices as political within the context of constantly changing external circumstances (Giddens
1991:215). In other words, our modern conception of citizenship encompasses more than just how we think of ourselves; it also includes how we think of ourselves interacting with and affecting others. John Barry extends this idea by mapping out a theoretical connection between reflective cooperation and the natural environment and argues that there now exists a political-moral element to living in the modern world of human- environment embeddedness – a sense that one is a “citizen-in-society-in-environment”
(Barry 1996:128). Andrew Dobson labeled this trend toward considering the environmental and global consequences of one’s actions in a “non-discriminatory and non-territorial” way “post-cosmopolitan ecological citizenship,” and has argued that this way of thinking is the key to connecting people globally (Dobson 2003:75).
There are still those in the United States and other industrialized countries who favor state-centered international politics – namely, wealthy individuals and corporations with an interest in maintaining current economic policies that were developed before widespread concern about ecological sustainability and global justice. There is even evidence those with vested interests in opposing environmental regulations are deliberately using an anti-reflexivity strategy to their benefit, effectively undermining climate science and proposed climate policies (McCright and Dunlap 2010), as well as evidence that big business interests exert substantial influence over global environmental governance (Gareau 2008). Thus, while changing institutional norms, corporate practices, and government policies will be necessary in order to facilitate a move toward
122 sustainability on a scale large enough to make a dent in climate change, the push to do so will probably not come from our current institutions. Rather, it will much more likely come from democratic action on the part of the majority of citizens without such a stake in the status quo – perhaps through participation in NSMs (Beck 1992; Beck et al. 1994).
Especially to the extent that some type of large scale change is necessary to shift toward sustainability, individual actors who begin finding themselves less safe and comfortable under business-as-usual may be more likely to provide the momentum for pro- environmental action to seriously address climate change (Magdoff and Foster 2011;
Schor 2011).
Ultimately, whether people choose to turn inward to protect themselves as best they can, or outward to pursue collective action to address shared problems, may be a key turning point in the human response to climate change. This study finds a positive association between identification as both world citizens and autonomous individuals and concern for global warming, suggesting that promoting these social identities is one way to improve our chances of reaching cooperation on climate. It also highlights the need for future work that investigates how people think about the individual and communal nature of environmental risks and their own responsibilities for environmental problems, with particular attention to identifying the conditions that foster mobilization and a strong, democratic international civil society. While it is true that obstacles exist that make it difficult for citizens to influence global environmental action, it is also true that without the presence of such citizens, or if concerned citizens fail to unite, transformational
123 change is unlikely to occur. As of now, the struggle for how we will respond is underway.
124
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List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1. Citizenship Identifications by Country Type
_ 120 Citizenship Identifications by Country Type 100
80
60
All Countries Percent Annex I 40 Non Annex I
20
0 World Citizen National Citizen Local Autonomous Community Individual
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Table 1: Descriptive Statistics and Metrics of Variables VARIABLE METRIC ALL ANNEX I NON- COUNTRIES ANNEX I Mean(SD) Mean(SD) Mean(SD) Dependent Measure Global 1 = yes .60(.49) .62(.49) .58(.49) Warming Very Serious Citizenship Identifications World 1 = yes .78(.41) .74(.44) .81(.39) Citizen National 1 = yes .95(.21) .94(.24) .96(.19) Citizen Local 1 = yes .91(.29) .88(.32) .93(.26) Community Autonomous 1 = yes .72(.45) .78(.41) .68(.47) Individual Controls Left 1-10, 1 = right 5.32(2.40) 5.64(2.10) 5.11(2.56) Political 10= left Ideology Education 1-9, 1=no educ. 5.50(2.46) 6.09(2.19) 5.12(2.55) 9=univ. deg. Age In years 41.84(16.24) 46.49(16.55) 38.86(15.31) Female 1 = yes .50(.50) .50(.50) .49(.50) Number of 43 17 26 countries Number of 40,330 15,247 25,083 observations Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey
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Figure 2: Per Capita CO2 Emissions by Country Category
Per Capita CO2 Emissions in Annex I Countries Average of Years 2005-2008
USA 5.05 Australia 5.01 Canada 4.58 Finland 3.12 Germany 2.65 Japan 2.64 Norway 2.63 Poland 2.24 Spain 2.17 Italy 2.13 Ukraine 1.94 Slovenia 1.79 Bulgaria 1.78 Sweden 1.48 Switzerland 1.46 Romania 1.24 Turkey 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 Metric Tons of Carbon
Per Capita CO2 Emissions in Non-Annex I Countries Average of Years 2005-2008
S Korea 2.76 Cyprus 2.57 S Africa 2.35 Malaysia 1.98 Serbia 1.35 Georgia 1.34 China 1.34 Argentina 1.23 Thailand 1.15 Mexico 1.15 Chile 1.13 Jordan .99 Egypt .66 Uruguay .55 Brazil .53 Indonesia .45 Morocco .4 India .37 Moldova .36 Vietnam .34 Ghana .1 Zambia .05 Burkina Faso .03 Rwanda .02 Ethiopia .02 Mali .01
0 1 2 3 4 5 Metric Tons of Carbon
Source: U.S Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC)
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Table 2: Coefficients and Odds Ratios of Multilevel Logistic Regression Models Predicting Evaluating Global Warming Very Serious by Country Category Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Annex I Non-Annex I All Countries Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds Coefficient Odds (SE) Ratio (SE) (SE) Ratio Ratio Citizenship Measures World Citizen .26*** 1.30 .16*** 1.17 .21*** 1.23 (.04) (.04) (.03) National Citizen -.12 .05 -.07 (.08) (.08) (.05) Local Community .02 -.14** .87 -.06 (.06) (.06) (.04) Autonomous .17*** 1.19 .18*** 1.20 .16*** 1.17 Individual (.04) (.03) (.03) Controls Left Political Ideology .08*** 1.08 .01 .03*** 1.03 (.01) (.01) (.00) Education .06*** 1.06 .10*** 1.11 .08*** 1.08 (.01) (.01) (.01) Age .00 .00 .00 (.00) (.00) (.00) Female .26*** 1.30 -.04 .08*** 1.08 (.04) (.03) (.04)
Per capita CO2 -.10*** .90 .01 .13*** 1.14 (.02) (.01) (.01) Constant .36 .27 .46 (.04) (.02) (.02) Log likelihood -10128.69*** -16238.53*** -26983.82*** ICC .61 .56 .60 AIC 20281.37 32501.06 53991.65 BIC 20372.96 32598.62 54095.16 Number of countries 17 26 43 Number of obs. 15,247 25,083 40,330 Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests) *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means.
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Table 3: Coefficients and Odds Ratios of Multilevel Logistic Regression Models Predicting Evaluating Global Warming Very Serious by Citizenship Typology in All Countries Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Coeff. Odds Coeff. Odds Coeff. Odds Coeff. Odds (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio (SE) Ratio Citizenship Measures WC & AI .23*** 1.26 (.02) WC only - .92 .08*** AI only (.03) - .85 .16*** Neither WC (.03) -.24*** .79 nor AI (.03) Controls Left Political .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 Ideology (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) Education .09*** 1.09 .09*** 1.09 .09*** 1.09 .09*** 1.09 (.00) (.00) (.00) (.01) Age .00 .00 .00 .00 (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) Female .07*** 1.07 .07*** 1.07 .07*** 1.07 .07*** 1.07 (.02) (.02) (.02) (.02) Per Capita .05*** 1.05 .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 .05*** 1.05 CO₂ (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) Constant .28*** .28*** .28*** .28*** (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) Log -30348.1*** -30399.92*** -30390.43*** -30379.92*** likelihood ICC .56 .57 .56 .57 AIC 60714.2 60817.85 60798.86 60777.83 BIC 60792.86 60896.5 60877.52 60856.49 N=countries 43 43 43 43 N=obs. 40,330 40,330 40,330 40,330 Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means.
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APPENDIX C – TOWARDS CLIMATE JUSTICE: HOW DO THE MOST VULNERABLE WEIGH ENVIRONMENT-ECONOMY TRADE-OFFS?
Abstract
It is frequently noted that the world’s poor are especially vulnerable to environmental disasters, including the adverse consequences of climate change. This creates a conundrum for advocates of climate justice who seek to ensure that those least responsible for causing climate change do not bear unwanted burdens of mitigation, especially since many proposals to address global warming would restrict economic activity, making it more difficult for the already disadvantaged to build economic security. This paper compares opinions on environment-economy trade-offs and willingness to make personal financial contributions to protect the environment among residents of 41 countries using data from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey, the 2010 Climate Risk Index, and World Bank development indicators. Results reveal that individuals in developing countries are less likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth. Nonetheless, residents of developing countries are also more likely to express willingness to donate personal income for environmental protection compared to citizens of wealthier nations. From a climate justice perspective, I argue that if addressing climate change and improving economic security among the world’s poorest individuals are both valued objectives, efforts to limit economic growth should be reserved to affluent countries. At the same time, the fact that residents of poorer countries express more willingness to make personal sacrifices for environmental protection should serve as a reminder of existing inequalities in the distribution of environmental hardships.
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Introduction
International surveys show that the vast majority of the world’s citizens are worried about climate change (World Values Survey 2005-2008, World Development
Report 2010). Climate scientists are especially worried. About 97% of climate researchers agree that if climate change is allowed to proceed unchecked it will cause serious and harmful disruptions to human life (Anderegg et al. 2010). The 2007
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report provided a detailed summary of the climate-related effects on earth systems to date, ending with a set of recommendations for how various policies, including macro-economic policy, agricultural policy, energy policy, and forest management practices, could be greened to improve adaptive capacity and reduce worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Despite these increasingly urgent warnings, however, international negotiations for the purpose of stabilizing the global climate have failed to produce a cooperative and enforceable action plan.
Probably the thorniest issue of climate policy proposals is that many strategies to address global warming require various types of restrictions on economic growth. This is a particular concern for less industrialized countries where a majority of residents are still struggling to achieve basic material security. Less industrialized countries are historically responsible for a much smaller share of the cumulative GHG emissions causing our current global climate dilemma. At the same time, these countries bear a larger proportion of climate change’s most immediately harmful consequences (IPCC
2007; Norgaard 2012; Parks and Roberts 2006; Roberts and Parks 2007). These
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inequalities are the reason consensus about proposed changes in economic activity to mitigate climate change is elusive even though concern is widespread, since disparate economic conditions lead nations to differently prioritize the trade-offs between promoting economic growth and curbing emissions (Parks and Roberts 2010). This inequality also leads to a lack of trust between wealthy, carbon-emitting countries and poorer countries with less developed economies – a problem of particular significance for climate negotiations as research has shown trust is especially important under conditions of uncertainty (Kollock 1994; Macy and Skvoretz 1998; Yamagishi, Cook and Watabe
1998). And in the case of climate change, there is much uncertainty to consider; while the reality that the global climate is warming is well-documented, it is difficult to predict exactly how a warmer climate will play out in mutually dependent regional ecosystems.
Deciding whether to promote climate policies that limit economic growth also has relevance for realizing climate justice, a concept that is attracting attention (Harris 2010;
Harris and Symons 2010; Hayward 2007; Parks and Roberts 2010; Penetrante 2011;
Roberts and Parks 2007; Roberts and Parks 2009). Climate justice highlights the ways in which climate change is an ethical issue, and how the causes and effects of climate change relate to both environmental and social justice. Climate justice seeks to take into account who is being affected by climate-related problems right now, and urges policymakers to use this knowledge when designing climate-related policies. As
Hayward (2007) argues in his article “Human Rights Versus Emissions Rights: Climate
Justice and the Equitable Distribution of Ecological Space,” there may be a baseline amount of per capita GHG emissions that are necessary for a minimum standard of
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living. Many residents of the world’s poorest countries have not yet reached this minimum level, but they should not be restricted in doing so because “what the worst off have a right to is secure access to the means to a decent life” (431).
Thus, one way to better incorporate justice into negotiations is to enhance our understanding of how particularly vulnerable citizens prioritize environmental protection in relation to other priorities. For example, how supportive are vulnerable people of policies that would prioritize the environment over the economy, and do differences exist between individuals residing in countries at different levels of economic development?
Some research has found that people in less industrialized countries consider environmental and economic issues connected, making the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection less clear-cut than it has traditionally been viewed in wealthier, industrialized countries (Guha 2000; Guha and Martinez 1997). This suggests that as a measure of general environmental concern, environment-economy trade-off questions are likely poor indicators among residents of developing countries.
Thus, as an additional gauge of commitment to environmental protection that does not require systematic changes in economic policy, an important follow-up question is: How willing are vulnerable individuals to make personal financial sacrifices to address environmental problems? Are there differences between more and less vulnerable individuals?
To answer these questions I use responses from individuals in 41 countries to the
2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) and country-level measures of climate risk from the 2010 Climate Risk Index (CRI), and economic and human
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development measures from the World Bank and the United Nations Development data.
I consider multiple measures of vulnerability to climate change, including environment- related climate hazards and socially constructed vulnerabilities. I divide my sample into
Annex I and Non-Annex I countries and use multilevel models in which individuals are nested within countries to assess the relative effects of different types of vulnerabilities.
The methodological decision to divide my sample into Annex I and Non-Annex I countries is based on the conceptual divisions made during the 1997 United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Kyoto meeting regarding differences in countries’ historical contribution to global warming and varying levels of current economic development. Annex I countries are industrialized countries that were members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), plus countries with transitioning economies such as the Baltic countries, many of the Eastern
European countries, and Russia. Non-Annex I countries are developing countries that have emitted fewer cumulative GHG emissions and thus do not have emissions reductions commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.
Overall, a number of substantive differences are revealed with respect to how vulnerability affects prioritization of environmental protection or economic growth and willingness to make personal financial sacrifices for the environment. In light of these differences and the fact that the world’s poor will have more difficulty adapting to changing climatic conditions, I argue that the opinions of these particularly vulnerable individuals should be given special consideration in decisions about how and where policies that include environment-economy trade-offs are applied.
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Literature Review
Environment-Economy Linkages North and South
One of the biggest differences in environmental values between citizens of developed and developing countries (also referred to as the Global North and South) are that environmentalists in the Global North are more likely to view environmental issues as separate from economic issues, while environmentally-oriented people in the Global
South are more likely to consider environmental and economic issues as related, even interchangeable (Guha 2000; Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). As Guha and Martinez-
Alier (1997) explain, in the Global South “issues of ecology are often interlinked with questions of human rights, ethnicity and distributive justice (18).” A well-known example of the overlap between environmental and economic issues in the Global South is the Brazilian rubber tappers movement. The movement began when the trees from which the locals extracted rubber to make a living were threatened by cattle ranchers pushing to clear-cut the forests for ranching. The motivation by the rubber tappers to preserve the trees was both practical and environmental, since the rubber tappers relied on the rubber trees for their livelihoods and economic security. Another example of a problem that connected environmental and economic concerns in the developing world is the Chipko movement in India. It began when a logging campaign by the state in India’s
Uttar Pradesh region began causing flooding, soil erosion and the need to travel long distances for fuel wood, threatening the safety and security of residents of small peasant villages in the forests. The loss of trees both decreased the availability of wood for furniture-making and other crafts that were the foundation of the local economies and
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made everyday tasks more difficult. The campaign, which was also gained international attention for the large number of women involved, intended to protect both the forests and these local economies (Guha 2000).
In contrast, in the Global North environmentalists often focus on protecting the environment for its own sake, and generally seek to minimize human use of natural resources. For example, one of the most popular environmental movements in the United
States in the 20th century was the preservation movement. Exemplified by the Sierra
Club, preservationists sought to protect wild areas from signs of human presence in order to maintain their natural, intrinsic value (Brulle 2000). The deep ecology movement is another example of this type of thinking, resting on the principle that maintaining natural systems should in many cases be prioritized over human needs (Naess 1993). An exception to this general trend in the Global North is the environmental justice movement, which gained prominence in the 1970s, as well as the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s. These movements, both of which draw participants from both developed and developing countries, do recognize economic as well as social justice issues as important in addition to environmental concerns. However, these factions remain somewhat separated from the larger, mainstream environmental movements in the
United States and many other developed nations.
Due to these differences in perspectives, life experiences and priorities, when environmentalists from the Global North get involved in promoting what they perceive as environmentally preferable outcomes in the Global South, the results can be painful.
Non-governmental organization (NGO) pressure from environmental groups and coercive
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economic agreements have resulted in the prohibition of the insecticide DDT in many developing countries, despite the findings from studies that the controlled use of DDT reduces deaths by malaria better than any currently available alternative (Driessen 2003).
While it may be true from an ideal environmental standpoint that the use of DDT is harmful, when the trade-off is higher rates of preventable deaths, the priorities of those directly affected are likely to be different than those for whom malaria is not a daily reality. Efforts such as these by more privileged environmentalists unfamiliar with the local communities they seek to reform have been labeled eco-imperialism (Driessen
2003) – a controversial term used to illustrate power inequalities and raise uncomfortable questions about the relative value placed on human life and ecosystem preservation in transnational environmental campaigns (Guha 1997). Some would argue the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) and campaigns to reduce deforestation in the Amazon are also instruments of eco-imperialism, as Northern environmentalists place pressure on those in developing countries in their efforts to solve the global environmental problem of climate change (Boyd 2009; Prouty 2009).
Vulnerability
Another issue that is gaining attention, especially among social scientists interested in both environmental and social equity, is that the most immediate burdens of climate change will be unevenly distributed throughout the world’s population. In other words, some individuals are more vulnerable than others to climate-related changes, based on a variety of factors including physical risk from environmental context (Parry et al. 2007) and social and economic factors that limit adaptive capacity (Adger et al. 2005;
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Eriksen and O’Brien 2007; Norgaard 2012) – a situation collectively referred to as
“climate inequality” (Roberts and Parks 2007). Scholars working to develop a general concept of vulnerability incorporate both environmental and social dimensions. In their definition, Eriksen and O’Brien define vulnerability as “the likelihood of injury, death, loss, disruption of livelihoods or other harm as the result of environmental shocks, such as floods, earthquakes or other hazards, or harm resulting from social changes such as conflict or economic restructuring” (338). The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR)
(2001: 995) hones in on climate vulnerability in particular, defining it as “The degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes. Vulnerability is a function of the character, magnitude, and rate of climate variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity.” In both of these definitions the potential to bounce back from climate-related shocks is critical for the measurement of vulnerability and is generally referred to as adaptive capacity. The IPCC TAR defines adaptive capacity as
“the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes), to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences (982).” Clearly, among the most important resources for adapting to environmental change are financial means and economic opportunity.
Given this attention to climate inequality there are efforts to identify indicators of national-level vulnerability and adaptive capacity. In their study of the determinants of climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity at the national level, Brooks, Adger and Kelly
(2005) found access to sanitation, literacy rates, and governance indicators such as access
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to participation in the governmental process among the key indicators of vulnerability
(160). Economic development status is another form of vulnerability, sometimes referred to as “structural vulnerability” (Bunker 1985; Parks and Roberts 2006). Countries structurally disadvantaged in the global economy, such as those with colonial pasts and those with economies based largely or entirely on resource extraction or single crops, are much more vulnerable to both environmental and economic shocks. In their paper
“Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice,” Parks and
Roberts (2006) investigated disparities in responsibility, vulnerability, and mitigation for climate change using three specific cases of climate disaster: Hurricane Mitch in
Honduras, rising sea levels in the Pacific Island nations, and flooding in Mozambique.
They found that Honduras was particularly vulnerable to Hurricane Mitch because of weak social infrastructure, extreme inequality in land ownership and a severely exploited natural resource base from its long colonial history as supplier of raw resources for the world economy (344). In other words, their low position in the global economic structure requires countries like Honduras to trade on their natural resources from a disadvantaged structural position. The result, as Neil Adger (2001) concluded, are that “the impacts of climate change are likely to be greater on those countries more dependent on primary sector economic activities [mostly farming], primarily because of the increase in uncertainty on productivity in the primary sectors (925).”
So, how does vulnerability affect citizen support for climate-related policies? In a
U.S. based study Zahran et al. (2006) found that people who are more vulnerable to climate-related problems, in particular those who reside in places at higher risk for
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extreme weather events, are more likely to support aggressive climate policies.
Internationally, however, despite high levels of climate vulnerability, past work has concluded that residents of poorer, developing countries consider climate policies that require restrictions on their own economic development fundamentally unfair (Najam
2004; Parks and Roberts 2006).
Global Economic Inequality and Climate Justice
Amidst all of this discussion about trade-off thinking as it pertains to economic growth, environmental protection, and the well-being of communities worldwide, it is important to acknowledge that economic growth is not necessarily bad for the environment. At recent climate negotiations representatives of developing countries have pushed for the right to pursue “sustainable development” and the eradication of poverty under the recommendations of international climate agreements (Roberts and Parks
2009:386). Conversely, it is also important to recognize that not all economic development correlates with a reduction in poverty. In fact, studies have found that despite increased exports many developing countries have seen the prices of their raw materials drop and poverty levels remain largely unchanged (Giljum 2004; Muradian and
Martinez-Alier 2001). These realities are likely the result of a global economic hierarchy in which already powerful economic actors are able to attain raw natural resources at increasingly low costs as less powerful countries are forced to speed up the extraction and sale of material goods to keep up.
These different positions in the global economic hierarchy also translate into different conceptions of what equity and justice mean at international climate
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negotiations. One of the key sticking points has been the question of financial responsibility and reparations. Many negotiators from developing countries focus on corrective, distributive justice and argue that the wealthier high-emissions countries should pay for adaptation infrastructure in poorer countries that are already feeling the consequences of climate change in order to pay off their “ecological debt” (Ikeme 2003;
Roberts and Parks 2009). Meanwhile, negotiators from wealthier countries take the position that economic success should not be punished, and that any damage to the environment from past activities should be grandfathered in (Neumayer 2001; Roberts and Parks 2007; Roberts 2001). Disagreement with respect to financial aid and responsibility for changes in economic development activities has become a primary point of contention at climate negotiations and the impetus for the climate justice movement. This research aims to determine how residents of economically diverse countries think about environment-economy trade-offs in their own countries, as well as their own willingness to dedicate personal financial resources to the protection of the environment.
Data and Measures
Data
The individual level data for this study come from the 2005-2008 wave of the
World Values Survey (WVS), the most recent data from this survey series available. The
WVS is a large data collecting effort conducted every five to six years by an international network of social scientists for the purpose of accumulating information on basic social
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and political values among individuals in countries around the world. Numerous social scientific studies have used the WVS, especially for comparisons of how cultural values affect economic development, democracy, and a country’s level of happiness, as well as over time predictors of other forms of global social change. The WVS has also been used to study attitudes about environmental problems, including an extensive debate about the relationship between post-materialist values and environmental concern. Using WVS data some scholars have found that affluence is positively associated with environmental concern ((Duroy 2008; Inglehart 1995; Kidd and Lee 1997), initiating an “affluence thesis” of environmental concern. However, other scholars, using the WVS as well as other data, have sharply questioned these results and argued that citizen concern for environmental issues exists in countries at all levels of economic development and is neither dependent on affluence nor explained by so-called post-materialist values
(Brechin and Kempton 1994; Dunlap and York 2008; Gelissen 2007; Givens and
Jorgenson 2011).
The country level data come from the 2010 Climate Risk Index (CRI) and country development measures collected and made available by the United Nations and the World
Bank. Fifty-seven countries participated in the 2005-2008 wave of the WVS, though some countries employed a reduced version of the survey. Forty-one countries administered the full survey and also have scores for climate risk, so the results presented in this paper reflect these data.
One of the main criticisms of cross-national comparisons of concern for the environment is that the operationalization of pro-environmental attitudes between
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countries is often different (Dunlap and York 2008; Klineberg et al. 1998; Marquart-Pyatt
2007). Data limitations have made this practice difficult to avoid, but it has caused problems for assessing whether observed differences are a result of question-wording effects or true variation in attitudes. However, for the purpose of overcoming these obstacles, the WVS is a good instrument because respondents in all countries are asked the same questions. Additionally, because individual-level responses are grouped at the country-level, the WVS also allows for the use of multilevel models. These qualities make the WVS an excellent dataset for international comparable research.
Dependent Variables
I use two questions measuring commitment to environmental protection as dependent measures of environmental concern. The first of these juxtaposes concern for the environment with concern for the economy by asking respondents which of the following two statements comes closer to their own values: “Protecting the environment should be given priority, even if it causes slower economic growth and some loss of jobs” or “Economic growth and creating jobs should be the top priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.” In the analysis, support for the first statement is coded one (indicating a pro-environmental attitude) and support for the second zero
(indicating a pro-growth perspective).
The second dependent variable asks whether or not an individual would be willing to donate their own money for the purpose of improving global environmental protection by asking respondents to strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: “I would give part of my income if I were certain that the money
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would be used to prevent environmental pollution.” Responses to this question were coded one if the respondent strongly agreed or agreed with this statement and zero if the respondent disagreed or strongly disagreed. Dunlap and York (2008) and Gelissen
(2007) also compared this question about income donation in previous waves of the
WVS. Dunlap and York (2008) used the 1990-1993, 1995-1998, and 1999-2001 waves to examine the relationship between country-level affluence and citizen concern for the environment, finding that willingness to make economic sacrifices to support environmental initiatives was more prevalent among citizens of less affluent countries in the 1990-1993 and 1999-2001 waves and unrelated to national wealth in the 1995-1998 wave. Gelissen (2007) found that citizens in countries with lower levels of national wealth were more likely to express willingness to pay for environmental protection than citizens in wealthier countries in the 2005-2008 wave.
Independent Variables
The following analysis includes a variety of measures of vulnerability to test their effect on attitudes about the environment and willingness to contribute personal resources for its protection. Two of these are measures of economic well-being: household income and per capita GDP. Climate-related problems humans are likely to face in the coming decades include severe weather events such as hurricanes, floods and long droughts which may lead to difficulty accessing important resources such as food and clean water
(IPCC 2007). The challenges of obtaining these necessary resources or in rebuilding one’s home or business after a natural disaster may be mitigated by personal economic resources; wealthy people have an advantage affording food and other goods, especially
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given that prices often increase after disruptive events. At the individual level I use a measure of household income that asks in which decile, 1 – 10, a respondent would place their household income counting all wages, pensions and other incomes as compared to other households in their country. Because the price of most goods and services including those that would be important after an extreme weather event vary by country, this country-specific measure is better for evaluating relative economic resiliency between individuals in countries with different price norms than a fixed dollar income measure. I also include per capita GDP as a country level measure of relative economic vulnerability. I log this variable for the analysis to reduce skew at the high end of the distribution.
The primary measure of environmental vulnerability is a quantification of climate risk. This measure is based on an index of weather-related disasters and their impacts on countries calculated by the development organization Germanwatch on the basis of four country-level indicators: annual death toll from weather-related events, deaths per
100,000 inhabitants, total losses in purchasing power parity (in million U.S. $) and losses per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) in percent. The measure is meant to identify the countries hardest hit by extreme weather events in order to design adaptation strategies for these and other countries that will likely experience similar events in the future. The original CRI ranks countries from 1 to 151.75 with 1 being the most impacted and at risk country in the world. For the purposes of this analysis I reverse the coding of this variable in order to make interpretation more intuitive – high scores on the vulnerability scale are equal to higher levels of vulnerability. (It is important to note that
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the CRI does not take into account the slower, longer-term effects of climate change like desertification and frequent flooding – changes that will be particularly difficult for underprivileged individuals who rely more heavily on subsistence farming to secure adequate food. However, the measure offers an initial attempt to quantify a country’s vulnerability to some of the more immediate consequences of climate change.)
In addition to economic vulnerability and climate risk, a recent study by Brooks et al. (2005) found a number of other factors to be highly associated with vulnerability to climate change. Among these are access to sanitation and clean water, a country’s overall adult literacy rate, and the availability of democratic political rights. Thus, I include a measure of the percentage of a country’s population with access to sanitation, the percentage of a country’s population with access to clean water, the percentage of a country’s adult population (citizens 18 years of age or older) who are literate, and an individual evaluation of how democratically governed one’s country is run from the
WVS, measured on a scale of one (least democratic) to 10 (most democratic), in the following models. These additional measures of vulnerability are intended to provide a multi-dimensional assessment of the effect of vulnerability on environment-economy trade-offs.
Control Variables
Four of the most important predictors of pro-environmental attitudes from past research are education, left political ideology, young age and female sex (Dunlap and
Jones 2002; Dunlap and McCright 2008; Gelissen 2007; Jones and Dunlap 1992; Jones et al. 2003; Olofsson and Öhman 2006). I include control variables for education, coded in
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ascending categories from one (indicating no education) to nine (indicating completion of a university degree), political ideology coded one for most conservative to 10 for most liberal, age coded in years, and a dummy variable for sex coded one for female and zero for male to analyze the extent to which vulnerability affects environmental concern above and beyond the impact of these frequently identified factors.
Descriptive statistics for the sample populations in the wealthier, industrialized
(Annex I) and the poorer, less industrialized (Non-Annex I) countries reveal some similarities and a number of differences. On average, respondents are older, more educated, have slightly higher relative household incomes and are more likely to hold leftist political orientations in Annex I countries as compared to Non-Annex I countries.
Adult residents of Annex I countries are also more likely to be literate and have access to sanitation and clean water. With respect to environmental concern, Annex I residents are more likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, but a larger proportion of Non-Annex I residents report willingness to donate their own money for the protection of the environment. The extent to which one’s country’s government is perceived to run democratically is identical in both Annex I and Non-Annex I countries.
A complete summary of these descriptive statistics is presented in Table 1.
Methods
I use bivariate correlation graphs and multilevel logistic regression to test whether multiple measures of vulnerability are associated with my two measures of environmental concern. Logistic regression is the best statistical technique for analyzing binary dependent measures, producing easily interpretable and comparable odds ratios.
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Multilevel models are preferred for nested data, such as individuals nested within countries, because they can correct for biased standard errors due to the dependence of individual factors based on country of residence (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002).
Multilevel models are also useful for analyzing the extent to which variation in the dependent variable is a result of between-individual or between-country differences as indicated by the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). In these models, the dependent variable is a dichotomous response, in which the probability that the response is equal to one is defined as Υij = Pr(γij=1), where i represents the individual and j represents the country of residence. In the first set of models the dependent variable is the log odds of prioritizing the environment over economic growth, and in the second set of models it is the log odds of agreeing to contribute personal income for the protection of the environment. Raw logistic regression coefficients are translated into odds ratios by exponentiating the coefficients (eg. e(.30)=1.35).
In order to determine whether there are differences in the factors driving preferences for environment-related opinions in countries with different levels of economic development, I divide my sample into residents of Annex I and Non-Annex I countries. These data include the following Annex I countries: Australia, Bulgaria,
Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States. The Non-Annex I countries included in the analysis are Brazil, Burkina Faso, China, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Georgia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Moldova, Peru,
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Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Trinidad Tobago, Uruguay,
Vietnam and Zambia.
Results
An initial look at the bivariate relationship between climate risk and prioritizing the environment suggests a slightly negative correlation between the two (r = -.40) in
Annex I countries. The slope of the line falls slightly as a country’s climate risk score increases, but the relationship is weak. This result is somewhat surprising given that countries with higher climate risk scores are those that have experienced more climate- related disasters in the past two decades. The negative correlation does not exist in the
Non- Annex I countries, however, where there appears to be no distinct relationship between climate risk and prioritizing the environment (r = .02). Figures 1-2 provide visual representations of these associations.
I next plot the relationship between per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and prioritization of the environment. Similar to past research that has found a positive relationship between affluence and pro-environmental attitudes (Dekker, Ester, & Nas,
1997; Franzen & Meyer, 2010; Inglehart, 1995; Oreg & Katz, 2006), per capita GDP appears positively related to prioritizing the environment in Annex I countries (r = .37).
This relationship is weaker though still positive in the Non-Annex I countries (r = .19).
These results are presented in Figures 3-4.
The next set of graphs reveal the bivariate relationship between these two measures of vulnerability – climate risk and per capita GDP – on willingness to donate
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one’s own income to protect the environment. In Annex I countries there seems to be a negative relationship, suggesting that individuals in countries at higher levels of climate risk are less likely to agree to investing their own money in protecting the environment (r
= -.45). Among residents of Non-Annex I countries, however, the relationship is weakly positive (r = .20), with a slightly higher percentage of residents of these economically developing countries at high risk for climate-related disruptions agreeing to contribute their personal financial resources for environmental protection. Figures 5-6 present these results.
Finally, Figures 7-8 depict the bivariate relationship between per capita GDP and willingness to donate one’s own income for the environment. In these graphs, the counterintuitive finding that the higher a country’s per capita GDP the fewer residents express willingness to donate their own personal income holds for both Annex I and Non-
Annex I countries, though the relationship is slightly stronger among residents of Annex I countries (r = -.28) versus Non-Annex I countries (r = -.08). This finding is consistent with studies using earlier waves of the WVS that found a negative correlation between national wealth and expressed willingness to make financial contributions for the benefit of the environment (Dunlap and York 2008; Fairbrother 2012).
In order to evaluate the statistical significance of these relationships when other factors are considered, I next present a series of multilevel logistic regression models.
Table 2 presents results for how vulnerability affects opinions about whether to prioritize environmental protection or economic growth, thus illuminating how concern for environmental protection fares among vulnerable individuals when it is placed in
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contention with economic plans. By juxtaposing the two most important dimensions of proposals to address climate change, this question gets to the heart of what has been contested by countries at different economic development levels at recent climate talks.
The most important revelation of the full model in Table 2 is that residents of Non-Annex
I countries are much less in favor of prioritizing environmental protection at the expense of economic growth. The odds a respondent in a Non-Annex I country will choose environmental protection over economic growth are 16% lower than among Annex I respondents. As Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) have suggested, issues of economic security, social justice, and environmental health are often intertwined in poorer countries. Thus, while Non-Annex I residents display unmistakable concern for the environment, even in the form of relinquishing scarce personal income, these individuals are clearly still reluctant to forfeit potential economic progress in their countries in order to protect the environment. A number of the other measures of vulnerability were also significantly related to attitudes about the environment. In Annex I countries, higher rates of adult literacy were negatively associated with prioritizing the environment, while rates of adult literacy had no effect in Non-Annex I countries. The proportion of a country’s residents with access to clean water was also negatively associated with prioritizing the environment in Annex I countries, but positively associated with this same policy preference in Non-Annex I countries. Overall, the more educated and politically liberal were more likely to prioritize environmental protection in both country categories, just as has been found in prior studies of factors predicting environmental concern. In Annex I
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countries females were also much more likely to report prioritizing environmental protection compared to males.
Table 3 presents the effects of multiple measures of vulnerability and controls on the odds of expressing willingness to donate one’s own income for environmental protection. The results of these models indicate that in Annex I countries, wealthier individuals, people with more leftist political orientations, and females are more likely to report willingness to donate personal income to protect the environment. Additionally, in both Annex I and Non-Annex I countries the perception that the government was run democratically was positively associated with offering personal money for environmental causes. At the country level, per capita GDP did not reach statistical significance in the divided models, suggesting that country wealth is not strongly associated with individual willingness to make financial contributions for the environment.
The full model displays the effects of each of the independent variables on willingness to donate one’s own income for the environment in all of the countries in the sample. One of the most noticeable points of this model is the substantial difference between residents of Annex I and Non-Annex I countries on reports of willingness to contribute one’s own income for the environment. The odds a respondent from a Non-
Annex I countries reported willingness to contribute their own money to protect the environment was 1.39 times higher than among respondents from Annex I countries. This is interesting because these respondents have much lower incomes on average, and there is also a modest positive association between per capita GDP and willingness to donate.
It is also interesting because at the individual level, the effect of household income on
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willingness to donate was positive. These results make interpreting the effect of financial resources on willingness to make financial sacrifices complicated, because on the one hand there is evidence that individuals with higher household incomes are more likely to agree to commit some of their own money for the protection of the environment, while on the other hand people who live in less economically secure countries are substantially more likely to be willing to make personal financial contributions for the environment. A number of the other measures of vulnerability, including access to sanitation, clean water, and adult literacy rates were slightly negatively associated with willingness to make individual contributions to protect the environment, but the effects were generally small.
Discussion
The purpose of this paper was to investigate how vulnerability affects individual choices about whether to prioritize environmental protection or economic growth and reported willingness to make personal financial sacrifices to improve the environment.
Among the most noteworthy findings are that while many dimensions of vulnerability decrease the odds an individual will prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, people living in more economically vulnerable countries are quite a bit more likely to report willingness to give away their own income to support a healthier environment. These results raise a seeming contradiction given that on average people in
Non-Annex I countries, which are by definition less economically developed, have substantially less money than their counterparts in the wealthier, Annex I nations. Data from the World Bank reveal that average annual per capita gross national income (GNI)
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among the Non-Annex I countries analyzed here was $4,730 (in U.S. dollars), while average annual per capita GNI in the Annex I countries included in this study was
$35,338 (World Development Indicators Database 2010). Despite the apparent illogic of this conclusion, the finding that individuals in poorer countries express more willingness to donate their personal income in support of environmental protection reaffirms that of prior studies that have discovered the same relationship between country level affluence and willingness to make individual financial contributions for the sake of the environment (Dunlap and York 2008; Fairbrother 2012).
Another somewhat incongruous finding from this analysis is that while the odds an individual in a Non-Annex I country was willing to personally contribute to environmental protection was higher than among individuals in Annex I countries, the odds these same individuals prioritized the environment over economic growth were lower than among Annex I residents. This suggests that when protecting the environment comes at the expense of country-wide economic development, an additional set of considerations are invoked. In the context of climate negotiations and proposed international treaties, this fact is especially important because most policies to address climate change would have some impact on conventional strategies for economic development. As scholars have noted, one of the primary dimensions of vulnerability to environmental disasters are narrow industrial bases and economic dependence on countries with more power within the global economy (Najam 2004; Parks and Roberts
2006; Roberts and Parks 2009). If, in order to improve their own living standards as well as their resilience to environmental problems these countries recognize that improving
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their economic security is necessary, the prioritization of economic growth may not indicate lack of concern about the environment but rather a longer-term adaptation strategy. Moreover, as prior studies have pointed out environmentalism is often closely linked to basic struggles for economic security and survival among the relatively vulnerable and disadvantaged (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Pulido 1996), so the question of which of these two goals to prioritize may seem redundant. As a result, the question on the WVS juxtaposing environmental protection and economic growth written by scholars in Annex I countries where these two objectives are more often at odds may be unequipped to capture the more nuanced relationship between support for the environment and economic development in the minds of Non-Annex I residents.
That personal and country-level vulnerability differently affect willingness to donate one’s own personal income to protect the environment also has implications for our understanding of the global distribution and intensity of environmental concern. For one, these results suggest that personal willingness to financially contribute to protect the environment may be a better measure of environmental concern in developing countries than questions about economy-environment trade-offs. It also suggests that considering a country’s environmental vulnerability may be especially important. According to the
WVS data individuals residing in the country at the very top of the Climate Risk Index in
2010 – Vietnam – expressed the most willingness to donate their own income to solve environmental problems; among the Vietnamese respondents 96% agreed that they would give their own money if they knew it would be used to benefit the environment. This is all the more noteworthy because Vietnam has among the very lowest average per capita
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gross national incomes ($1100/year), even among the Non-Annex I countries analyzed in this study (United Nations Data 2011). This conclusion suggests the possibility that under extreme environmental conditions environmental problems may become so visible and devastating that the improvement of the environment becomes a widespread priority.
From a climate justice perspective, these findings are important to consider given that a main goal of climate justice is to improve the outcomes of the most vulnerable citizens of the world who had little to do with creating the problem of climate change.
Ultimately, the preference among the most vulnerable for economic growth over environmental protection, despite the evidence that environmental protection is also a valued goal among this population, highlights the persistent lack of economic opportunities for many individuals worldwide. On the other hand, the fact that almost all of the Vietnamese respondents to the WVS expressed serious concern for environmental conditions by agreeing to personally contribute scarce resources for its protection suggests that people do value environmental health. Given that the average American contributes 15 times more of the greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution that is causing climate change compared to someone living in Vietnam, justice under these circumstances would require international agreements to allow countries like Vietnam to continue developing while more economically developed countries make serious efforts to reduce the GHG emissions that are contributing to Vietnam’s exceptionally high degree of climate risk.
Of course, in considering this larger goal of improving well-being in general, it is important to take a closer look at the relative role economic development and environmental health play in overall well-being. Research has found that income is
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positively associated with happiness up to a point, after which the marginal utility of additional income reaches a point of diminishing returns (Diener and Biswas-Diener
2002; Frey and Stutzer 2002). This suggests that economic development that facilitates financial security among residents of developing countries who have not yet met this threshold would be beneficial, but that the positive association between economic development and well-being is not linear in the long term and thus growth policies can be redesigned once basic material needs have been met. With respect to the environment, it is clear than when environmental pollution and contamination cause noticeable health effects or are linked to increased mortality, well-being suffers (Roberts and Toffolon-
Weiss 2001; Sze 2006). However, the point at which desired development causes unacceptable costs is controversial and often depends on one’s personal situation and perspective (Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss 2001).
Conclusion
For policymakers, negotiators, activists, scientists and average citizens interested in seeing progress made on climate, finding common ground upon which to build an international agreement is an urgent goal. This research sought to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the different policy and behavioral inclinations of those who are currently the most and least vulnerable to the adverse consequences of climate change. The analysis focused on the role of both economic and environmental vulnerability, including personal financial resources, country-level economic status, geographic proximity to recent climate-related disasters, and access to clean
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environmental conditions on attitudes about the prioritization of environmental protection or economic growth and willingness to make monetary investments for the betterment of the environment. Because issues of economic development are central to climate change and many of the proposals to address it place serious limits on certain types of development, improving climate justice requires remembering the unequal causes and consequences of this global environmental problem, and that the costs of restricting economic development are not the same for everyone.
Researchers should continue to investigate how average people in countries at different levels of economic development weigh the costs and benefits of proposed policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. To facilitate this, we need better theories to explain environmental concern in all development contexts – theories that incorporate the crucially important component of how people form opinions about the trade-offs between environmental protection and economic growth and the extent to which access to personal or national resources affect this decision-making process. As
Parks and Roberts (2006) argue, the underlying cause of climate vulnerability is global economic inequality that keeps economically disadvantaged nations in weaker positions and contributes to deep mistrust between rich Annex I countries and poor Non-Annex I countries during climate negotiations. They contend, therefore, that “addressing climate injustice is therefore an eminently practical way of resolving the negotiating deadlock
(351).” While comprehensive, contextual and comparable data that adequately incorporates these various inequities is difficult to obtain, improving our knowledge in these areas would vastly improve the chances of realizing climate justice.
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List of Figures and Tables
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics and Metrics for Key Variables by UNFCCC Category VARIABLE METRIC ANNEX I NON-ANNEX I Individual Level Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Prioritize Environment 1 = yes .58 (.49) .51 (.50) over Economic Growth Donate Income for 1=yes .58 (.49) .69 (.46) Environment Household Income 1=lowest, to 4.80 (2.48) 4.48 (2.17) 10=highest
Education 1=no education, to 5.81 (2.25) 4.84 (2.57) 9=university, with Left Political Ideology degree 5.59 (2.1) 5.10 (2.55) 1=right, to 10=left Female 1=yes .54(.50) .51(.50)
Age In years 47.19 (17.27) 39.17 (15.57)
Country Level Climate Risk 1=lowest, to 83.52 (31.01) 75.81 (33.34) 151.75=highest
Per Capita GDP In logged U.S. $ 10.17 (.54) 8.48 (.97)
Access to Sanitation % with access, 0-100 96.41 (7.76) 65.74 (31.89)
Clean Water % with access, 0-100 98.71 (3.02) 81.05 (23.76)
Democratic Government 1=least democratic, to 6.51 (2.27) 6.51 (2.52) 10=most democratic N (countries) 17 24 N (individuals) 15,155 23,299 Source: World Values Survey, 2005-2008
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Figure 1.
The Effect of Climate Risk on Prioritizing the Environment
Results from Annex I Countries
100 80 NOR CHE CAN AUS FIN SWE ESP ITA 60 TUR JPN USA
0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000 Per Capita GDP
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Figure 5.
The Effect of Climate Risk on Willingness to Donate Own Income for Environment
Results from Annex I Countries 100
TUR 80
NORSWE CAN JPN CHE ITA 60 FIN AUS USAESP
40 DEU
20
Donate Own Income for Environment Income Own for Donate 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 Climate Risk
177
Figure 6.
The Effect of Climate Risk on Willingness to Donate Own Income for Environment Results from Non-Annex I Countries
100 VNM
THAMEXGTM MLI GHABFA CHN 80 GEO ETH PERKOR TTO JOR CYP IDN IND RWA MDA MYS 60 CHL ARG SER BRA ZAF EGY ZMB
URY MAR
40
20
Donate Own Income for Environment Income Own for Donate 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 Climate Risk
178
Figure 7.
The Effect of Per Capita GDP on Willingness to Donate Own Income for Environment
Results from Annex I Countries 100
TUR 80
CANSWE NOR JPN CHE ITA 60 FINAUS ESP USA
40 DEU
20
Donate Own Income for Environment Income Own for Donate 0
0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000 Per Capita GDP
179
Figure 8.
The Effect of Per Capita GDP on Willingness to Donate Own Income for Environment Results from Non-Annex I Countries
100 VNM
GTMTHA MEX BFAMLIGHA CHN 80 ETH GEOPER KOR IDNJOR TTOCYP IND RWAMDA MYS 60 ARGCHL BRAZAFSER ZMB EGY
MAR URY
40
20
Donate Own Income for Environment Income Own for Donate 0
0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000 Per Capita GDP
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Table 2. Logistic Regression Coefficients and Model Fit Statistics for the Odds of Prioritizing Environmental Protection over Economic Growth Variables Annex I Non-Annex I Full Model Countries Countries All Countries Coefficient OR Coefficient OR Coefficient OR (SE) (SE) (SE) Individual Level Household Income .01 .01 .01* 1.01 (.01) (.01) (.01) Education .10*** 1.11 .03*** 1.03 .05*** 1.05 (.01) (.01) (.01) Left Political .10*** 1.11 .02** 1.02 .05*** 1.05 Ideology (.01) (.01) (.00) Age -.00* 1 .00 -.00 (.00) (.00) (.00) Female .11** 1.12 -.00 .05* 1.05 (.03) (.03) (.03) Country Level Non-Annex I -.17*** .84 (.04) Climate Risk -.01*** .99 -.00** 1 -.01*** .99 (.00) (.00) (.00) Per Capita GDP .38*** 1.46 -.25*** .78 .05† 1.05 (logged) (.05) (.03) (.03) Sanitation .02* 1.02 .00 -.01*** .99 (.01) (.00) (.00) Clean Water -.08*** .92 .03*** 1.03 .03*** 1.03 (.02) (.00) (.00) Adult Literacy -.06*** .94 -.00* 1 .02*** 1.02 (.01) (.00) (.00) Democratic .01 .00 .00 Government (.01) (.01) (.01) Constant 1.25*** -.10*** .17*** (.20) (.02) (.03) Number of countries 17 24 41 Number of obs. 15,155 23,299 39,298 Log likelihood -9883.46 -14846.73 -25204.42 ICC .46 .52 .57 Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey †p<.10 *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means (McCoach 2010).
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Table 3. Logistic Regression Coefficients and Model Fit Statistics for the Odds of Being Willing to Donate Own Income to Protect the Environment Variables Annex I Non-Annex I Full Model
Countries Countries All Countries Coefficient OR Coefficient OR Coefficient OR
(SE) (SE) (SE) Individual Level Household Income .06*** 1.06 .05*** 1.05 .05*** 1.05 (.01) (.01) (.01) Education .12*** 1.13 .07*** 1.07 .10*** 1.11 (.01) (.01) (.01) Left Political .09*** 1.09 -.01* .99 .03*** 1.03 Ideology (.01) (.01) (.01) Age .00*** 1 .00 .00** 1 (.00) (.00) (.00) Female .06† 1.06 .05† 1.05 .05* 1.05 (.03) (.03) (.02) Country Level Non-Annex I .33*** 1.39 (.03) Climate Risk -.01*** .99 .01*** 1.01 -.00*** 1 (.00) (.00) (.00) Per Capita GDP .06 .05 .07** 1.07 (logged) (.04) (.03) (.03) Sanitation .01 -.00** 1 -.01*** .99 (.01) (.00) (.00) Clean Water .04* 1.04 .00 -.01*** .99 (.02) (.00) (.00) Adult Literacy -.21*** .81 .00 -.01*** .99 (.02) (.00) (.00) Democratic .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 .04*** 1.04 Government (.01) (.01) (.01) Constant 2.53*** .89*** .57*** (.26) (.02) (.03) # of countries 17 24 41 # of obs. 15,155 23,299 39,298 Log Likelihood -9891.18 -12347.65 -23005.05 ICC .63 .45 .50 Source: 2005-2008 World Values Survey †p<.10 *p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 *Individual-level variables are centered around their group means; country-level variables are centered around their grand means (McCoach 2010).