Expected climate change consequences and their role in explaining individual risk judgments

Discussion The goal of the current paper was to categorize expected climate change impacts according to Bo¨hm and Pfister’s [11] framework for environmental risks. Following the general outline pro- posed by this framework, individuals may focus on one or more of the five levels when asked in an open-response format what they perceive to be the causes or consequences of climate change (attitudes, motives and goals, actions and activities, emissions and pollution, environ- mental changes, and/or impacts on humans). The specific aims were to (i) explore the distribu- tion of impact categories across and between four European countries, (ii) predict the mentioning of specific impact categories from socio-demographics, and (iii) investigate the relationship between the impact categories and two types of risk judgments. Impact categories The physical and social environment in a country might generate a shared understanding of both what is affected by climate change (e.g., human health vs. environmental damage) and to what degree this is considered a risk [31]. Whether respondents mention changes in actions and activities or impacts on humans as the most important impact might, for example, depend Table 4. Predicting worry about climate change and risk evaluation from the content of causal beliefs about cli- mate change (weighted). Worry about climate change Risk evaluation B (SE) B (SE) Intercept 2.82 (0.09)��� 3.78 (0.09)��� Attitudes, motives, and goals (Level 1) 0.52 (0.10)��� 0.23 (0.09)� Actions and activities (Level 2) 0.05 (0.07) -0.13 (0.08)

Emissions and pollution (Level 3) 0.29 (0.07)��� 0.12 (0.07) Environmental changes (Level 4) 0.18 (0.06)�� 0.18 (0.06)�� Impacts on humans (Level 5) 0.19 (0.06)�� 0.13 (0.05)�� Hardly any impacts -0.63 (0.10)��� -0.22 (0.10)� Gender Women 0.27 (0.04)��� 0.08 (0.03)� Age 25–34 0.11 (0.07) -0.04 (0.06) 35–44 0.09 (0.07) -0.07 (0.06) 45–54 0.00 (0.06) -0.21 (0.06)��� 55–64 0.07 (0.07) -0.23 (0.06)��� 65+ -0.04 (0.06) -0.31 (0.06)��� Political orientation -0.08 (0.01)��� -0.04 (0.01)��� Country Norway 0.31 (0.05)��� -0.02 (0.05) Germany 0.29 (0.06)��� 0.36 (0.05)��� France 0.52 (0.06)��� 0.28 (0.05)��� Variance explained R2 = .14 R2 = .09 Note. n = 3228 for worry about climate change and n = 3169 for risk evaluation. Political orientation is continuous, gender is dichotomous (men as reference category), and age (age group 15–24 as reference category) and country (UK as reference category) categorical. All reported p-values are based on the Wald test. �p < .05 ��p < .01 ���p < .001 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281258.t004 PLOS ONE Expected climate change consequences and individual risk judgments PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281258 February 15, 2023 8 / 15