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

on a countries’ previous climate change experiences and media reporting. This could again influence the cognitive availability and accessibility of examples of climate change conse- quences to the population [23, 24, 32]. Even though the four countries have different socio- political profiles [27], our results do not support drastic differences between them. Instead, the findings align with literature showing that when laypeople are asked to elaborate on climate change in general, they tend to focus on environmental impacts [33–36]. This pattern was con- sistent across the four countries investigated in the current study, indicating that certain aspects of people’s causal beliefs about climate change might be somewhat generalizable, inde- pendent of socio-political factors [27]. Despite the correspondence regarding the level at which expected climate change consequences were identified, the obtained answers may still differ in content; for instance, we find that people in Germany and France more frequently mention natural disasters. With regards to the remaining levels, impacts on humans, which would be the most direct consequence of environmental changes according to the framework, was the second biggest category. Not many, even in the key energy-producing countries included in this study, men- tioned changes in attitudes, actions, or emissions as the most important impact. However, we found some differences between countries. For example, the category ’action and activities’ turned out to be mentioned more frequently in the UK and Norway compared to Germany

and France. Although the differences were not very large, one might speculate that ‘actions Table 5. Predicting worry about climate change and risk evaluation from the structure of causal beliefs about cli- mate change (weighted). Worry about climate change Risk evaluation B (SE) B (SE) Intercept 2.94 (0.09)��� 3.86 (0.08)��� Width 0.11 (0.05)� 0.07 (0.05) Depth 1 0.10 (0.03)�� 0.05 (0.03) Depth 2 -0.02 (0.05) -0.07 (0.05) Gender Women 0.26 (0.04)��� 0.10 (0.03)�� Age 25–34 0.08 (0.07) -0.06 (0.06) 35–44 0.06 (0.07) -0.07 (0.06) 45–54 -0.01 (0.06) -0.23 (0.06)��� 55–64 0.05 (0.07) -0.25 (0.06)��� 65+ -0.05 (0.07) -0.33 (0.06)��� Political orientation -0.08 (0.01)��� -0.04 (0.01)��� Country Norway 0.25 (0.05)��� 0.01 (0.05) Germany 0.24 (0.06)��� 0.40 (0.05)��� France 0.45 (0.05)��� 0.30 (0.05)��� Variance explained R2 = .09 R2 = .08 Note. n = 3092 for worry about climate change and n = 3041 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.t005 PLOS ONE Expected climate change consequences and individual risk judgments PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281258 February 15, 2023 9 / 15