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In South Africa, one of the world’s most carbon-intense economies and a society marked by gross social inequality, climate change is not a popular topic. As of 2018, more than half of the population had never heard of climate change and only one in five South Africans believed that human activities lead to global warming. The communication of climate change in South Africa is influenced by the notorious inequality that the country still suffers decades after the apartheid regime has ended. Few South Africans are able to live a life in prosperity and security on par with life in industrialized nations, more than half of the population are considered poor, almost a third of the population are chronically unemployed, and many work for carbon-intense industries.
The country’s prevalent inequality and its economic dependency on coal influence the way climate change is communicated and interpreted. Environmental NGOs, journalists, and scientists frequently set communication cues on climate change. However, their messages are largely circulated in newspapers catering to an urban and educated readership and resonate less with people living in rural areas or those who rely on employment in the coal and mining sector.
In South Africa, most people hear about climate change in mass media, but journalists frequently lack the resources and training necessary to investigate climate change stories or to interact with local scientists. Environmental NGOs, in contrast, provide easily comprehendible communication cues for unspecialized journalists and often share similar worldviews and demographic backgrounds with dedicated environmental reporters. However, because Black South Africans are underrepresented among environmental journalists and because many affordable local newspapers cannot afford to hire specialized reporters, climate change is covered mostly in high-quality English-language outlets to which most people have no access. Moreover, environmental NGOs are frequently accused of prioritizing abstract ecological concerns, like climate change, over the interests of the South Africans workers, a sentiment that is informed by the country’s history of racial injustice. Counterintuitively, living in a coal area is associated with higher climate change awareness and belief, likely because coal companies and trade unions conduct awareness-raising programs among their workers and because many residents experience the adverse impact of coal mining and combustion firsthand.
Klimaschutz und Verkehr: Zielerreichung nur mit unbequemen Maßnahmen möglich. Ariadne-Analyse
(2021)
Die Klimaschutzziele für das Jahr 2030 sind im Verkehrssektor nur mit starken zusätzlichen Treibhausgasreduktionen erreichbar. Die beschlossenen Maßnahmen können laut gegenwärtigen Projektionen nur einen Bruchteil jener Emissionen reduzieren, welche für die Erreichung der Klimaschutzziele im Verkehrssektor notwendig wären. Um die politische Umsetzbarkeit zusätzlicher Klimaschutzmaßnahmen zu erörtern, analysieren wir die Emissionsminderungswirkung und die Bevölkerungsakzeptanz von 14 möglichen Maßnahmen, basierend auf Drittstudien und eigenen Erhebungen. Wir zeigen, dass die wirkungsstärksten Maßnahmen tendenziell eine geringe Zustimmung in der Bevölkerung erfahren, wobei die Lastenverteilung keinen sichtbaren Einfluss auf die Bevölkerungsakzeptanz hat. Maßnahmen, die in der Bevölkerung mehrheitlich unterstützt werden, führen nach gegenwärtigen Projektionen nur zu geringen Treibhausgasreduktionen, so dass die Erreichung der Klimaziele 2030 ohne kontroverse Maßnahmen wie höhere CO2-Preise oder einer flächendeckenden Maut unwahrscheinlich ist. Um die Befürwortung von gegenwärtig kontroversen Maßnahmen zu erhöhen, ist es notwendig, sichtbare Rückverteilungsmechanismen zu etablieren, Maßnahmen durch gruppenspezifische Kommunikation zu begleiten und die Einführung von Politikinstrumenten strategisch zu sequenzieren.
Von der Sektorkopplung bis zum Wasserstoff, von der Umsetzung des Klimaschutzgesetzes bis hin zum europäischen Green Deal: Um Klimaneutralität zu erreichen, braucht es eine koordinierte und effektive Politiksteuerung über einzelne Ressorts hinweg. Klimapolitik ist Querschnittsaufgabe, denn von der Stromerzeugung über Industrie, Gebäude und Verkehr bis hin zur Landwirtschaft müssen alle Sektoren mit hohem Tempo treibhausgasneutral werden. Fachleute des vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung BMBF geförderten Kopernikus-Projekts Ariadne haben zentrale Probleme der staatlichen Steuerung deutscher Klimapolitik untersucht und Lösungsoptionen vorgelegt.
Trotz des erheblichen Ausbaus der erneuerbaren Energien in der Vergangenheit hat Deutschland Schwierigkeiten, seine nationalen Klimaschutzziele zu erfüllen. Als Reaktion darauf hat der Deutsche Bundestag im Jahr 2019 ein nationales Klimaschutzgesetz (KSG) verabschiedet. In diesem Bericht analysieren wir die Governance der deutschen Klimapolitik vor der Verabschiedung des KSG, die wichtigsten Gestaltungselemente des KSG und das Potenzial des KSG, die Integration der deutschen Klimagovernance zu verbessern. Dabei stellen wir fest, dass die deutsche Klimagovernance vor dem KSG nur mäßig integriert war. Mit der Einführung des KSG und der dort spezifizierten Sektorziele wird Klimaschutz jedoch zu einem prioritären Politikziel in allen wirtschaftlichen Sektoren. Darüber hinaus können die im KSG beschlossenen Monitorings- und Nachsteuerungs-Bestimmungen dazu führen, dass sektorspezifische Maßnahmen über die Zeit immer besser mit den nationalen Klimaschutz-Zielen abgestimmt werden. Insgesamt fördert das KSG hierbei jedoch eher eine multisektorale als eine sektorübergreifende Klimagovernance und versäumt es dabei, die Koordinierung zwischen Sektoren und Ministerien zu stärken.
Carbon taxes are considered a key instrument for achieving deep decarbonization but are often unpopular among voters. While existing studies indicate that public opposition to carbon taxes is influenced by climate change belief and by political trust, less is known about the relevance of other factors. Moreover, it remains unclear why people oppose carbon taxes more fiercely than other climate policies. To enhance understanding of carbon tax opposition, I synthesize and categorize 28 conditions that potentially provoke public opposition to carbon taxes, assess their independent importance for predicting carbon tax opposition, and review the specific form in which they predict carbon tax opposition. This analysis draws on data from approximately 44,400 individuals from 23 European countries. It uses a random forest model, a machine learning method, to estimate independent prediction effects. The results identify the feeling of personal responsibility for trying to reduce climate change as the most important condition for predicting opposition to carbon taxes and for predicting attitudes on other climate policies. Political trust, in contrast, strongly predicts carbon tax opposition but not attitudes on other climate policies, suggesting that low political trust could explain the peculiar public aversion against carbon taxes. Recycling revenues from existing carbon prices back to households, often considered crucial for securing public support, is only associated with minor increases in the acceptance of higher carbon taxes. Finally, the results reveal that age, market liberal values, and good governance are related to carbon tax opposition in a non-monotonous pattern.
Despite significant renewable energy expansion in the past, Germany has encountered difficulties in meeting its national greenhouse gas emission targets. In response, Germany adopted the Federal Climate Change Act (CCA) in 2019. We analyze the state of climate governance in Germany before the CCA, the main design elements of the CCA, and assess the potential of the CCA to change German climate governance. Drawing on policy integration theory and 26 semi-structured interviews with senior policymakers and stakeholders, we find that German climate governance before the CCA was only moderately integrated. The sectoral emission targets legislated by the CCA make climate change mitigation a priority sector goal in non-energy sectors, and CCA provisions for monitoring, assessing and implementing policy reforms promise to enhance alignment of instruments with targets over time. Overall, the CCA advances a multi- rather than cross-sector climate governance, failing to advance coordination across sectors and ministries.
Democracy and Public Opinion Formation: How Illiberal Regimes Suppress Climate Change Concern
(2021)
Do illiberal regimes suppress public discourse on environmental problems? We advance theory on environmental information control and test whether civil liberties have influenced the diffusion of climate change concern across 118 countries. Using a spatial model of synthetic panel data from 611,909 individuals, we find each unit change in the 7-point civil liberty index to impact climate change concern by 5 [95% CI: ±2] percentage points in the short term, a result that is robust to unobservable confounding and consistent across thousands of plausible model specifications. We find the effect to be even stronger for affluent countries, but much smaller for low-income countries and highly educated cohorts. A spatial system of seemingly unrelated regressions suggests that news coverage and protest activities could be pathways for civil liberties to influence public opinion. Our study has implications for the merits of democratic governance of climate change and for comparative public opinion formation.
Carbon pricing is widely considered a key policy instrument for achieving substantial climate change mitigation. However, implementation remains patchy and price levels vary significantly across countries and regions. In this article, we analyze the structural social, political, and economic conditions under which carbon prices have been implemented so far. We estimate a Tobit regression model to investigate variations in explicit carbon prices over 262 national and subnational jurisdictions. Our results highlight well-governed institutions and public attitudes as the most important conditions for carbon pricing and characterize fossil fuel consumption as a barrier to the implementation of carbon prices. The results suggest that governance and public attitude need to be integrated into political economy analysis. Policy makers should take regulatory capacities and public attitudes seriously when designing carbon pricing policies.
Decades after the scientific community agreed on the existence of human-made climate change, substantial parts of the world’s population remain unaware or unconvinced that human activity is responsible for climate change. Belief in human-made climate change continues to vary strongly within and across different countries. Here I analyse data collected by the Gallup World Poll between 2007 and 2010 on individual attitudes across 143 countries, using a random forest model, to show that country-level conditions like environmental protection, civil liberty, and economic development are highly predictive of individual climate change belief. Individual education and internet access, in contrast, are correlated to climate change awareness, but much less to belief in climate change’s anthropogenic causes. I also identify non-linear pattern in which country-level circumstances relate to individual climate change belief. The local importance of most predictors varies strongly across countries, indicating that each country has its relatively unique set of correlates of climate change belief.
Demokratie und NGOs machen den Unterschied: Was Menschen weltweit über den Klimawandel wissen
(2021)
In einigen Teilen der Welt weiß nur eine Minderheit vom Klimawandel – und dass er durch menschliches Handeln verursacht wird. Welche Faktoren das individuelle Bewusstsein für die Klimakrise beeinflussen und was Organisationen hierzulande tun können, um weltweit die Aufmerksamkeit für das Thema zu stärken, beschreibt der Berliner Politikwissenschaftler Sebastian Levi in seinem Gastbeitrag