Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours

Model 3 the hierarchical regression found environmental beliefs to be a significant predictor of climate change concern, explaining 10% of the variance (Table 1, Model 3). These results demonstrate that environmental beliefs are a better predictor of climate change risk perception. Lastly, we tested whether adding age (Model 4) and gender (Model 5) would increase the predictive power of the model. For example, older people may be less concerned about climate change since they might not expect to live to see the consequences of climate change [40]. Additionally, an American study found women tended to be more concerned about climate change [59]. Of the two variables, only gender was a significant predictor of participants’ levels of climate change concern (Table 1), with women being more concerned about climate change than men. Age as a factor affecting climate change concern was not supported by our data (Table 1). Overall, we found that technological optimism, environmental beliefs and gender were the best predictors of a person’s level of climate change concern (Fig 5). Self-reported ability to visualize the future and personal optimism were not major influencers in individuals’ judgments regarding climate change risk. We did not ask participants about their political affiliations. This was an oversight as studies have shown that people who identify as Democrats are more likely to be concerned about cli- mate change than people who identify as Republican [60, 61]. A Gallup poll from December

2019 found that Democrats and Independents were more likely to state climate change is an extremely important election issue for them than Republicans whereas terrorism was an important consideration for all three political groups [62]. Therefore, future studies interested in examining factors that could contribute to climate change risk judgement should include political views, values and worldviews. That being said, a study investigating Americans’ per- ceptions of what they think future energy systems will look like in the year 2050 found little Fig 4. Percentage agreement with statements regarding participants’ environmental beliefs. (N = 1068–1071) �original wording: Humans have the right to modify the natural environment to suit their needs. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545.g004 Fig 5. New model. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545.g005 PLOS ONE Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545 February 3, 2021 10 / 17