Resumen de An important but less pressing issue?: individual actions against climate changein Romania over the last decade
According to Eurobarometer surveys, Romanian citizens consider climate change the fourth most pressing problem. Still, at the same time, the country’s citizens are relatively less involved in actions to prevent and mitigate climate change. There is, therefore, undoubtedly an attitude-action gap. Using data from the Special Eurobarometer Climate Change 2009, 2019, and 2021, I examined the frequency with which each type of action to prevent and mitigate climate change is taken in Romania.
I also put the Romanian data into context (e.g., EU27, EU24, Visegrad Four) to give an idea of how far the individual actions of Romanians fall behind or fit into the broader picture of the European and post-socialist region.
After the descriptive data, I also carried out a short multivariate analysis.
For this purpose, I looked at the impact of socio-demographic and specific climate change-related variables on the aggregate (cumulative scale) of the actions under study. The most popular climate action is household energy saving. Selective waste collection, buying local food, and environmentally friendly transport are moderately popular. All of these actions may be motivated by reasons other than climate change mitigation, e.g., financial scarcity, health protection, and support for the local economy. The regression model results suggest that the better educated, the better off tend to take more climate action. More intense attitudes toward the urgency of climate change positively influence the taking of action. Perhaps one of the most important observations is that the pandemic did not significantly impact the actions listed, nor did it hurt environmental and climate action.
