Conference Agenda

Public support is central to the implementation of climate policy, yet evidence on how climate-related information affects policy preferences remains mixed. This paper studies how scientifically grounded climate information, framed as either good or bad news, shapes support for climate policies and examines through which emotional channels these effects operate. We conduct a large-scale survey experiment with approximately 8,000 respondents in Germany, exposing participants to short texts summarizing recent scientific findings on climate sensitivity, policy effectiveness, and progress toward climate targets. When significant, bad news tends to increase support for climate policies, while corresponding good news does not symmetrically reduce it. However, good news about successful policy performance---the effectiveness of carbon pricing to reduce emissions---increases support for the specific policy discussed, with limited spillover to other policy domains. Emotional responses can help explain a substantial share of these effects, with worry and guilt increasing policy support and calm reducing it. By contrast, purely factual information yields smaller and less robust effects. Overall, the findings point to emotional responses as an important channel through which climate information and scientific news affect policy support.

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a critical global challenge and important environmental stressor. The literature highlights the importance of incorporating gender analysis into climate research, as gender relations shape social transformations associated with climate change. While multiple studies confirm women’s stronger pro-environmental attitudes and greater willingness to act, as well as women’s stronger belief in the anthropogenic causes of climate change, others show no statistically significant gender-based differences in climate change perceptions or public opinion about climate change taxes and laws. The aim of this study is to assess gender-based differences in climate change attitudes in 27 countries. In our research we rely on survey data and use econometric techniques appropriate for ordinal data. We run logit and ordered logit regressions to explain the role of gender in shaping attitudes towards climate change controlling for several other socio-demographic factors. We find that that women and men have rather different attitudes towards climate change. In particular, women express higher concerns about climate change than men, and they tend to feel more personal responsibility for climate change mitigation. We also document cross-country heterogeneity in gender differences in climate change awareness and differences in determinants of knowledge and feelings about climate change among women and men analyzed in separate regressions.

In stated preference methods, researchers often rely on surveys and typically aim to obtain a random sample of the target population. However, participation is rarely random, and sample selection can bias welfare estimates. The problem compounds in multi-wave designs, where there is an initial participation stage into the first wave, an agreement to be re-invited stage into a second wave and a follow-through stage into the second wave. Many stated preference studies with longitudinal data do not model these layered selection processes, potentially leading to bias in welfare estimates. To address this research gap, we extend the Heckman selection framework commonly used for cross-sectional data to a dataset combining respondents who participated in one survey wave with those who participated in both waves. This extended framework corrects for (i) selection into the initial survey, (ii) selection into re-invitation, and (iii) selection into completing the second wave, each linked to willingness-to-pay (WTP) elicited through double-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation. We apply the model to a Danish survey study on public WTP for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) conducted in 2022 and 2023. Ignoring selection bias leads to an underestimation of household WTP by 43%, with the bias driven primarily by systematic differences between respondents who participated in both waves and respondents who participated in one wave Respondents who participated in both waves report higher WTP that declines over time, while respondents who participated in one wave report lower WTP that rises modestly. Aggregate WTP for CCS is otherwise temporally stable.

Within the European Union’s climate and resource policy frameworks, long-lived wood products play a key role in the transition towards sustainable consumption and production patterns as they store carbon for long periods of time and can substitute carbon-intensive materials. Using a discrete choice experiment, we estimated the preferences for furniture differing in material, production location, carbon footprint, and price in four distinct European contexts: Belgium (Flanders), Czech Republic, Norway and Spain. Given the limited evidence on the role of carbon footprint labelling in shaping consumer demand for wood products, we further examined how different information cues influence the market uptake of wooden furniture.

The results demonstrate social acceptance of wooden alternatives in all study regions. Respondents consistently preferred locally and European-produced furniture and showed heterogeneous preferences for carbon footprint attributes across study regions. Our findings suggests that a disclosure nudge informing about the long term carbon storage potential of wood increases preferences for solid-wood materials. Additionally, implementing a carbon labelling scheme expands demand for wood products and encourages substitution away from carbon-intensive materials, highlighting the relevance of carbon labelling as a demand-side instrument to support the development of bio-based products.