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Environmental Awareness and Public Support for Protecting and Restoring Puget Sound

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Abstract

In an effort to garner consensus around environmental programs, practitioners have attempted to increase awareness about environmental threats and demonstrate the need for action. Nonetheless, how beliefs about the scope and severity of different types of environmental concerns shape support for management interventions are less clear. Using data from a telephone survey of residents of the Puget Sound region of Washington, we investigate how perceptions of the severity of different coastal environmental problems, along with other social factors, affect attitudes about policy options. We find that self-assessed environmental understanding and views about the seriousness of pollution, habitat loss, and salmon declines are only weakly related. Among survey respondents, women, young people, and those who believe pollution threatens Puget Sound are more likely to support policy measures such as increased enforcement and spending on restoration. Conversely, self-identified Republicans and individuals who view current regulations as ineffective tend to oppose governmental actions aimed at protecting and restoring Puget Sound. Support for one policy measure—tax credits for environmentally-friendly business practices—is not significantly affected by political party affiliation. These findings demonstrate that environmental awareness can influence public support for environmental policy tools. However, the nature of particular management interventions and other social forces can have important mitigating effects and need to be considered by practitioners attempting to develop environment-related social indicators and generate consensus around the need for action to address environmental problems.

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Notes

  1. 1,302 individuals from King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Mason counties were surveyed in January and February 2012; 678 residents of Skagit and Whatcom Counties were surveyed in July and August 2012.

  2. The response rate for the first wave of the data collection was 21 % (using RR4, American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 2011), which is similar for equivalent telephone surveys (Kohut et al. 2012). The survey was expanded in the summer of 2012, with an added emphasis on decreasing non-contacts and refusals. These led to a higher response rate of 31 % for the second wave. Although the first wave had lower response rates, response distributions for all items on the survey were not statistically different across waves. These results are consistent with previous research which demonstrates that more rigorous follow-up techniques on telephone surveys do not yield different survey results (Keeter et al. 2000).

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this project was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (grant DW13923277), and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act, the survey presented here was approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Management Budget under OMB Control Number 0648-0641. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire and Dr. Larry Hamilton for his assistance with statistical analyses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire, 417 Horton Social Science Center, Durham, NH, 03824, USA

    Thomas G. Safford & Megan Henly

  2. NOAA – National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, 98112, USA

    Karma C. Norman & Phillip S. Levin

  3. Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland, ME, 04101, USA

    Katherine E. Mills

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  1. Thomas G. Safford
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Correspondence to Thomas G. Safford.

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Safford, T.G., Norman, K.C., Henly, M. et al. Environmental Awareness and Public Support for Protecting and Restoring Puget Sound. Environmental Management 53, 757–768 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-014-0236-8

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