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Population and Environment
Published in: Population and Environment 4/2022

04-03-2022 | Original Paper

Gender and climate action

Authors: Niklas Elert, Erik Lundin

Published in: Population and Environment | Issue 4/2022

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Abstract

It is well-known that men and women differ in their views regarding the severity of climate change, but do they also differ in their support for climate policy and in undertaking climate action in their everyday lives? Previous survey evidence on these questions is inconclusive, but we can answer them using unique survey data from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). Regression analysis confirms that Swedish women believe more strongly than men that climate change will affect Sweden. Furthermore, women engage in more climate-mitigating behavior than men, even conditional on climate beliefs. The association between gender and climate policy support is less robust, and disappears altogether when climate beliefs are controlled for, demonstrating that climate beliefs are the main mechanism explaining the relationship between gender and policy support.
previous article The effect of natural disasters on nuptiality: evidence from L’Aquila earthquake (Italy)
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Footnotes
1
The Swedish word for gender is könsidentitet, and the word for sex is kön.
 
2
When we instead use as dependent variable a binary variable indicating if the response was “Don’t know,” as opposed to all other response levels, the female variable is nearly always insignificant, suggesting there is no gender effect associated with self-reported lack of knowledge regarding any of the statements. The sole exception belongs to category B, where women are moderately more likely to choose “Don’t know” when it comes to support for taxing harmful goods (B1).
 
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Metadata
Title
Gender and climate action
Authors
Niklas Elert
Erik Lundin
Publication date
04-03-2022
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Population and Environment / Issue 4/2022
Print ISSN: 0199-0039
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7810
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00397-x

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