• DOI:10.1038/s43247-021-00118-6
• Corpus ID: 232052935

Country-level conditions like prosperity, democracy, and regulatory culture predict individual climate change belief

@article{Levi2021CountrylevelCL,
  title={Country-level conditions like prosperity, democracy, and regulatory culture predict individual climate change belief},
  author={Sebastian Levi},
  journal={Communications Earth \& Environment},
  year={2021},
  volume={2}
}

• S. Levi
• Published 26 February 2021
• Environmental Science
• Communications Earth & Environment

Decades after the scientific community agreed on the existence of human-made climate change, substantial parts of the world’s population remain unaware or unconvinced that human activity is responsible for climate change. Belief in human-made climate change continues to vary strongly within and across different countries. Here I analyse data collected by the Gallup World Poll between 2007 and 2010 on individual attitudes across 143 countries, using a random forest model, to show that country-level conditions like environmental protection, civil liberty, and economic development are highly predictive of individual climate change belief. Individual education and internet access, in contrast, are correlated to climate change awareness, but much less to belief in climate change’s anthropogenic causes. I also identify non-linear pattern in which country-level circumstances relate to individual climate change belief. The local importance of most predictors varies strongly across countries, indicating that each country has its relatively unique set of correlates of climate change belief. Country-level conditions such as civil liberty are highly predictive of climate change belief, whereas individual attributes such as education are related more to awareness than belief, suggests a random-forest analysis of individual attitudes in 143 countries.