Current methodological challenges and applications in environmental and climate research |
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| Coordinator 1 | Professor Henning Best (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Christiane Bozoyan (LMU Munich) |
| Coordinator 3 | Mrs Manuela Schmidt (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) |
| Coordinator 4 | Dr Claudia Schmiedeberg (LMU Munich) |
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.