ESRA 2025 Preliminary Program

Monday 14 July    Tuesday 15 July    Wednesday 16 July    Thursday 17 July    Friday 18 July   

All time references are in CEST

Current methodological challenges and applications in environmental and climate research 2
Session Organisers	Professor Henning Best (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) Dr Christiane Bozoyan (LMU Munich) Mrs Manuela Schmidt (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) Dr Claudia Schmiedeberg (LMU Munich)
Time	Tuesday 15 July, 15:30 - 17:00
Room	Ruppert A - 0.21

Climate change and the depletion of Earth’s natural resources are among the largest challenges humanity currently faces. Addressing them requires ambitious policies promoting technological innovation and influencing human behavior and interactions within socio-economic systems. However, there is a great need of large-scale behavioral data such as panel data and natural as well as survey experiments that enable causal analyses (Jenny & Betsch, 2022).
To advance research on the human dimension of climate change, we need a thorough understanding of public perceptions of climate policy and environmental behaviors, and how these relate to the individual and to structural constraints related to socio-economic positions. Methodological challenges include the measurement of environmental behavior and households’ carbon footprint, often skewed by self-reporting biases, social desirability, and lack of knowledge. Questions on public opinion and policy agreement are particularly susceptible to response bias due to climate skepticism and opposition to policies. At the same time, climate skepticism as well as protest behavior towards environmental policies may be hard to measure due to privacy concerns. Survey experiments are suited to measure evaluations of complex policies and vague or uncertain payoff structures.
Linking survey data with new data sources offers new perspectives for environmental research. For example, the addition of geospatial information or sensor data allows for the consideration of context effects, while administrative data can help to close data gaps and validate measurements. These approaches still pose methodological challenges in managing and analyzing linked data and questions of data protection, sensitivity, and privacy.
This session will showcase approaches to measuring environmental attitudes and behaviors and innovative designs using smartphones, sensor or other new data sources to enhance environmental survey data. We especially welcome studies that further develop methodological approaches and explore (interdisciplinary) substantive applications of survey methods in environmental research.

Keywords: environmental research, climate change, sustainability, data linkage, survey experiments

Papers

Can Regional Compensation Mechanisms Increase Support for Carbon Taxes? Evidence from Austria

Ms Theresa Wieland (University of Konstanz) - Presenting Author

As climate change urgency intensifies, carbon taxation schemes are increasingly recognized as essential tools to reduce emissions. However, public support for such taxes often hinges on perceptions of fairness, particularly regarding their impact on different social and geographic groups. Policymakers frequently introduce compensation mechanisms to address these equity concerns, such as redistributing tax revenues to mitigate regional disparities. In Austria, a unique compensation system adjusts payouts based on citizens’ rurality and access to public infrastructure, offering an ideal case for studying the effectiveness of regional revenue recycling.
This study employs a multi-method approach to investigate public perceptions of fairness and support for carbon taxes. First, an analysis of Austrian longitudinal survey data will track regional variations in support for carbon taxation across different stages of policy implementation. Second, a survey experiment will explore how citizens’ awareness of Austria's regional revenue recycling mechanism influences their support for the tax. This experimental design provides a robust framework to address key research questions: Do citizens understand the regional payout differences? Does informing them about these differences affect their attitudes toward the tax? Are there notable disparities in responses between rural and urban residents?
By integrating longitudinal survey data with an experiment, this study highlights methodological innovations in measuring public opinion on climate policies. The survey experiment's design allows for testing the effects of information on policy attitudes, while the Austrian survey data offers a broader temporal perspective on regional opinion dynamics.
The results will offer insights for designing equitable climate policies and contribute to advancing survey research methodologies for studying public opinion on complex policy issues. The survey will be conducted in early 2025. All findings will be finalized and prepared for the conference in July.

MEASURING CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTICISM

Mr Michael Friedrich (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau) - Presenting Author
Professor Henning Best (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau)

It is notable that, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence confirming the existence of climate change, a significant proportion of the population remains sceptical. Yet, there is a lack of carefully developed instruments that measure all dimensions of climate change denial: Trend, attribution, impact and response (see Rahmstorf (2004) and Capstick & Pidgeon (2014) for a discussion of the dimensionality). We build on scales developed by Whitmarsh (2011) and De Graaf et al. (2023) and integrate them into a tested scale. In a web survey of 532 participants from a non-probability online panel, we use Cronbach's alpha and confirmatory factor analysis, to evaluate the dimensionality, scalability and reliability of the newly developed, integrated instrument for measuring climate change scepticism. We propose three scale versions: a 12-item long scale, an 8-item short scale, and a 4-item very short scale, all covering four dimensions. Using nationally representative, large-scale data from the German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN), we evaluate the construct validity of the shortest scale, assess climate change scepticism prevalence, and analyze its distribution across socio-economic groups.


References

Capstick, S. B., & Pidgeon, N. F. (2014). What is climate change scepticism? Examination of the concept using a mixed methods study of the UK public. Global Environmental Change, 24, 389–401.
De Graaf, J. A., Stok, F. M., Wit, J. B. de, & Bal, M. (2023). The climate change skepticism questionnaire: Validation of a measure to assess doubts regarding climate change. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, 102068.
Rahmstorf, S., 2004. The Climate Sceptics. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam. (accessed 20.12.24) In: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Other/rahmstorf_climate_sceptics_2004.pdf
Whitmarsh, L. (2011). Scepticism and uncertainty about climate change: Dimensions, determinants and change over time. Global Environmental Change, 21(2), 690–700.

Beyond Polarization: Developmentalism and Environmental Values for Predicting Climate Skepticism in Turkey

Dr Sinan Erensü (Bogazici University)
Ms Daniela Kızıldağ (Bogazici University) - Presenting Author
Ms Sena Akkoç (Bogazici University)

The existing literature on climate change skepticism, predominantly informed by scholarship on data from advanced economies, often links skepticism and denialism to ideological polarization and entrenched political machinery opposing climate action. In Turkey, however, while political polarization exists, climate change skepticism has not yet been entirely subsumed within this divide, nor is there an established anti-climate change mobilization. Public belief in human-driven climate change is notably high, yet knowledge or support for climate policy lags significantly behind, making researchers question alternative approaches to explain this paradox. Drawing on a nationally representative survey (N=1500) from the 2024 Turkish Social Values Study (TSVS), conducted using the CAPI method, this paper examines how structural and political factors shape climate skepticism in Turkey.

We test whether perceptions of climate policy as a trade-off with state developmentalism and New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale parameters (Dunlap, 2008), such as anti-anthropocentrism, rejection of exemptionalism, and belief in nature’s balance can predict climate denial and skepticism. Sociodemographic factors, political values, and concern levels for climate change are controlled. We argue that paying attention to the role of developmental concerns and overall environmental sensitivity can help develop interventions to address climate skepticism and denialism. In a developmentalist context, such as Turkey, citizens may absolve the state of responsibility for addressing climate change, influenced by anti-globalist rhetoric, general cynicism towards environmental progress, or prioritization of economic growth instead. By proposing novel predictors for skepticism, our research contributes to the creation of measurement tools for climate change attitudes while assisting stakeholders and researchers in better understanding public opinion on climate change.

Measuring graduates’ climate change and environmental attitudes, skills and competencies through a European higher education graduate survey.

Ms Louisa Köppen (German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies) - Presenting Author
Dr Kai Mühleck (German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies)

Higher education is expected to play a major role in climate change adaptation and mitigation by supporting the formation of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, and by providing skills and competencies in the field of climate change and environmental sustainability. To assess the extent to which this expectation is met, we need reliable instruments to measure climate change and environmental attitudes, skills and competencies as an outcome of higher education. Here, graduates form an interesting target group, as we consider their attitudes, skills and competencies (partly) as a result of their higher education. Further, they hold a meaningful position, transferring attitudes, skills and competencies acquired during their studies to society when acting outside of higher education. Therefore, this research aims at exploring ways to measure graduate’s climate change and environmental attitudes, skills and competencies as an outcome of higher education.
To address this, we draw on data from the EUROGRADUATE 2022 project, a large-scale European survey, covering monetary and non-monetary outcomes of higher education graduates in 17 European countries. As a first step, we analyse the EUROGRADUATE 2022 data to reflect on the instruments used in the latest data collection, covering the engagement of graduates with environmental sustainability through the curriculum, climate change beliefs and concerns, and environmental efficacy beliefs. The focus lays on elaborating methodological challenges, such as clarity and informational value of the instruments, and the identification of potential response biases. Based on these outcomes we take a step further into a review of additional/alternative instruments, to, particularly, measure climate change and environmental skills and competencies in the context of higher education and by means of a survey. We will discuss possible measurements and give an outlook on how this could be implemented and tested in EUROGRADUATE 2026, the upcoming round of the survey.