Multilevel predictors of climate change beliefs in Africa

phenomenon but a local one [16]. Therefore, local weather changes may be used to prime cli- mate change and encourage mitigation and adaptation measures, but the link between those local changes and the global patterns of climate change should be highlighted. Material conditions had previously been found to influence climate change beliefs [44]. According to the “finite pool of worry" hypothesis, worse material conditions limit CCBs, as they create more urgent and pressing concerns for individuals to worry about. However, across African countries poverty has significant positive links with climate risk perception and the belief climate change must be stopped. In contrast to the finite pool of worry hypothesis, households with fewer resources are the most concerned about the present and future effects of climate change. Climate change is a close and urgent concern for them, as their income and assets are the most vulnerable to climatic risks [60, 67]. Political ideology also has a significant impact on CCBs in Africa. Authoritarian and intol- erant individuals show less climate change awareness, risk perception, belief that it must be stopped and self-efficacy. Authoritarian and hierarchical values have been consistent and nega- tively linked to climate change beliefs in other regions of the world [8], and our results show these links also hold across Africa. Ideology influences what information people access, and how they process and assimilate it [18–21]. Our findings imply that authoritarian individuals

are more likely to disregard climate change to justify their support for maintaining the status quo. These findings also suggest that it would be convenient for policy makers to reshape envi- ronmental discourses to better engage the authoritarian public. To do so, environmental policy and individual action can be framed as patriotism, innovation, or prosocial behaviour [68], and the focus of risk communication can be on the possible effects of climate change on human security and public order [69]. Like ideology, previous research has suggested that religion prompts motivated reasoning, shaping thus CCBs. Overall, declaring oneself religious is mostly insignificant to predict CCBs. However, we do observe some significant differences across religions in Africa: Catholic and Orthodox Christians are more likely to believe in the anthropogenic nature of climate change and that it must be stopped, while Sunni Muslims shows the opposite trend. Finally, we find that demographic variables such as gender or race have some importance for predicting CCBs. We find an important gender gap for awareness, as well as slightly nega- tive effects for other dimensions of climate change beliefs. Women are less likely to be aware of climate change, as previous case studies in Africa had suggested [16, 48, 70]. In this case, differ- ences in access to climate information do not explain this gender gap, so further research should address this issue. Besides, we find ethnicity to be related to risk perception and self- Table 1. Direction of relation of key predictors to CCBs.

Awareness Human causation Risk perc. Need to stop Self-efficacy Agric. conditions + + + + Human causation + + + Risk perception + + Education level + + + + Temp. anomaly + + + + + Online information + + Authoritarian - - - Lived poverty + + Gender (female) - Predictors ordered by overall importance across models for the top 15 predictors. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266387.t001 PLOS ONE Multilevel predictors of climate change beliefs in Africa PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266387 April 5, 2022 9 / 14