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Gender and climate action

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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.

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Availability of data and material

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

All Stata code is available from the authors upon request.

Notes

  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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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for data from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, and valuable comments from Carl-Magnus Bjuggren, Emma Heikensten, and Magnus Henrekson.

Funding

Financial support from Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius Stiftelse, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, and the Swedish Energy Agency is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), SE-102 15, Box 55665, Stockholm, Sweden

    Niklas Elert & Erik Lundin

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  1. Niklas Elert
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  2. Erik Lundin
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Correspondence to Niklas Elert.

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Elert, N., Lundin, E. Gender and climate action. Popul Environ 43, 470–499 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00397-x

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