Pinho Mariana
ECOMARE, Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, Department of Biology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
Front Sociol. 2025 Jun 9;10:1589501. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1589501. eCollection 2025.
Climate change represents the most significant environmental and social issue of our time. Climate change anxiety has been identified as a relevant consequence of climate change globally.
The current study explored how climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behaviour vary with gender and social psychological characteristics, using a nationally representative Portuguese sample.
The findings revealed that women reported higher levels of climate change anxiety compared to men, and this was driven by women's higher levels of climate change anxiety cognitive impairment. Women also indicated more frequent pro-environmental behaviours, higher levels of environmental identity and climate change perceptions than men. The findings further showed similar relations for men and women, between social psychological mechanisms (environmental identity and climate change perceptions) and their impact on climate change anxiety and some types of pro-environmental behaviours. The results also demonstrated that climate change perceptions mediated the effect of environmental identity on pro-environmental behaviours and those mediations were further moderated by gender.
The results highlight the importance of exploring the gender gap in environmental related attitudes and behaviours and the incorporation of gender mainstreaming in environmental sustainability policies and programmes.
气候变化是我们这个时代最重大的环境和社会问题。气候变化焦虑已被确定为全球气候变化的一个相关后果。
本研究利用具有全国代表性的葡萄牙样本，探讨了气候变化焦虑和亲环境行为如何随性别和社会心理特征而变化。
研究结果显示，与男性相比，女性报告的气候变化焦虑水平更高，这是由女性更高水平的气候变化焦虑认知障碍所驱动的。女性还表示比男性有更频繁的亲环境行为、更高水平的环境认同和气候变化认知。研究结果进一步表明，男性和女性在社会心理机制（环境认同和气候变化认知）及其对气候变化焦虑和某些类型亲环境行为的影响之间存在相似关系。结果还表明，气候变化认知介导了环境认同对亲环境行为的影响，并且这些中介作用进一步受到性别的调节。
结果强调了探索环境相关态度和行为中的性别差距以及将性别主流化纳入环境可持续性政策和方案的重要性。
