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Consumers’ knowledge about climate change

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Abstract

Several studies have unveiled various misconceptions about climate change that the public holds, for instance, confusion about climate change and ozone depletion. However, so far, there has been no uniform and standardized way to measure climate-related knowledge, which complicates comparisons between different countries or samples. To develop an extensive knowledge scale, we therefore examined the Swiss public’s understanding of climate change in a mail survey and related this scale to attitudes toward climate change. We thereby aimed to consider a broad range of climate-related knowledge, namely physical knowledge about CO2 and the greenhouse effect, knowledge about climate change and its causes, knowledge about the expected consequences of climate change, and action-related knowledge. The questionnaire included items of different degrees of difficulty, ranging from knowledge that is covered by newspapers to experts’ knowledge. Our findings indicate that people still hold several misconceptions, although people’s knowledge related to CO2 seems to have increased compared to previous studies. Of all knowledge subscales, knowledge about climate change and causes was most strongly related to attitudes toward climate change.

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Notes

  1. We also conducted analyses using the three answer categories (coded as “correct” = 2, “don’t know” = 1, and “wrong” = 0). They resulted in inferior scales, suggesting dichotomous scaling is more adequate.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on work supported by the project Climate Policy Making for Enhanced Technological and Institutional Innovations (ClimPol), which is funded by the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability of the ETH Domain (CCES). We would like to thank Maria Hakuba for conducting the interviews. We also thank the scientific experts on climate change for their valuable feedback on the knowledge items.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), Consumer Behavior, Universitaetstrasse 22 CHN J75.2, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christina Tobler, Vivianne H. M. Visschers & Michael Siegrist

Authors
  1. Christina Tobler
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  2. Vivianne H. M. Visschers
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  3. Michael Siegrist
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vivianne H. M. Visschers.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Items, means, standard deviations (SD), internal consistencies (alpha), and factor loadings of the attitudinal scales (English translations of original items)
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Tobler, C., Visschers, V.H.M. & Siegrist, M. Consumers’ knowledge about climate change. Climatic Change 114, 189–209 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0393-1

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