Do We Really Care About Climate Change?

A PAPER COAUTHORED BY ADAM NOWAKOWSKI, A MSC STUDENT, FINDS THAT CONCERN AMONG EUROPEAN CITIZENS IS VERY LOW AND THAT THIS LACK OF AWARENESS COULD UNDERMINE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ANY CONTRAST MECHANISM. POLICY MAKERS SHOULD THEREFORE FOCUS ON ALTERING INDIVIDUAL FEELINGS PRIOR TO DESIGNING NEW SCHEMES

Climate change may be on top of media headlines and scientists’ agenda, but it’s not at the top of European citizens’ minds, according to a paper co-authored by a Bocconi MSc student with a professor of the University of Warwick, recently featured on Vox.eu. On the contrary, parochial issues such as inflation, health (even before the COVID-19 pandemic), social security, unemployment, and the economic situation are considered much more important.
 
Adam Nowakowski and his mentor Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at Warwick, sifted through data from two large-scale surveys, the 2016 European Social Survey and the 2019 Eurobarometer, and found that only 5% of Europeans consider climate change “extremely worrying”, with higher concern only among women, young people, university graduates, city dwellers, and those living in Southern, warmer countries. Furthermore, the belief that joint action by energy users (in other words, personal behavior) can make a difference is very weak.

 
“Such disturbingly low levels of concern don’t necessarily mean that European citizens don’t care about climate change at all,” says Nowakowski, “but voters are clearly not going to tolerate measures with strongly negative consequences on their day-to-day lives only to reduce climate change. Before designing sophisticated economic policies to tackle the issue, we face the challenge of figuring out how to change citizens’ feelings about climate change.”
 
A first-year student of the MSc in Economic and Social Sciences, Nowakowski graduated in Economics at Warwick, under the supervision of Professor Oswald, with a thesis on personal well-being and populist vote, influenced by a seminal work on the subject by Bocconi Professor Massimo Morelli.
 
“As Professor Oswald, with Nicholas Stern, had already written on economists’ neglect of environmental topics,” Nowakowski says, “we thought to investigate citizens’ awareness, coming to similarly depressing conclusions.”
 
“I’m not interested only in economics, but also in psychology, political science, environment, and health, and I love multidisciplinary approaches”, Adam says, commenting on his choice of Bocconi for his MSc. “I was attracted by the presence of the likes of Professor Morelli, Valentina Bosetti for environmental issues and David Stuckler and Giovanni Fattore for health economics.”
 
Adam Nowakowski, Andrew Oswald, “Do Europeans Care About Climate Change? An Illustration of the Importance of Data on Human Feelings”, IZA Discussion Papers No. 13660.

by Fabio Todesco