Drews Stefan, Savin Ivan, van den Bergh Jeroen C J M, Villamayor-Tomás Sergio
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russian Federation.
Ecol Econ. 2022 Sep;199:107507. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107507. Epub 2022 Jun 1.
It remains unclear how COVID-19 has affected public engagement with the climate crisis. According to the finite-pool-of-worry hypothesis, concern about climate change should have decreased after the pandemic, in turn reducing climate-policy acceptance. Here we test these and several other conjectures by using survey data from 1172 Spanish participants who responded before and after the first wave of COVID-19, allowing for both aggregate and within-person analyses. We find that on average climate concern has decreased, while acceptance of most climate policies has increased. At the individual-level, adverse health experiences are unrelated to these changes. The same holds for negative economic experiences, with the exception that unemployment is associated with reduced acceptance of some policies. Complementary to the finite-pool-of-worry test, we examine three additional pandemic-related issues. As we find, (1) higher climate concern and policy acceptance are associated with a belief that climate change contributed to the COVID-19 outbreak; (2) higher policy acceptance is associated with a positive opinion about how the government addressed the COVID-19 crisis; (3) citizens show favorable attitudes to a carbon tax with revenues used to compensate COVID-19-related expenditures. Overall, we conclude there is support for addressing the global climate crisis even during a global health crisis.
目前尚不清楚新冠疫情如何影响公众对气候危机的参与度。根据担忧有限池假说，疫情之后人们对气候变化的担忧应该有所下降，进而降低对气候政策的接受度。在此，我们利用1172名西班牙参与者在新冠疫情第一波之前和之后的调查数据来检验这些以及其他几个推测，同时进行总体分析和个体分析。我们发现，平均而言，人们对气候问题的担忧有所下降，而对大多数气候政策的接受度有所提高。在个体层面，不良健康经历与这些变化无关。负面经济经历也是如此，不过失业与对某些政策的接受度降低有关。作为对担忧有限池检验的补充，我们考察了另外三个与疫情相关的问题。我们发现，（1）更高的气候担忧和政策接受度与认为气候变化导致新冠疫情爆发的信念有关；（2）更高的政策接受度与对政府应对新冠疫情危机方式的积极看法有关；（3）公民对用税收收入补偿新冠疫情相关支出的碳税持支持态度。总体而言，我们得出结论，即使在全球卫生危机期间，应对全球气候危机也是有依据的。
