Climate concern in Hungarian society

Denial, anxiety and action

Abstract

Climate change is one of, if not the most, important challenges facing the world today. Accordingly, it is important for climate policy at any level, and for the underlying decision-making process, that those responsible have an adequate picture and knowledge of the perceptions and attitudes of the relevant population towards the environment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, sometimes due to a lack of professional information, and sometimes due to a failure to inform decision-makers. The national and international literature tries to identify and measure more or less pro-environmental beliefs, behaviours and typical practices, and to explore their relationship with other individual characteristics, such as sociodemography, political views, values and norms, ideological and moral concepts, and ways of thinking. These works are characterised by an attempt to make meaningful statements about the population under study as a whole, either in terms of environmental awareness or in terms of the factors influencing it. The present study offers a new perspective in that it uses data from a large-scale, representative national survey to investigate climate-aware action and the factors influencing it only among those who are concerned with climate change. The majority of respondents are concerned about and experience the negative impacts of climate change. However, according to one of the main findings of the analysis, even within the group considered climate-sensitive, only one-third of them act pro-environmentally. This certainly suggests a need to rethink domestic climate policy.