Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:19:11.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Preferences for environmental issues among environmentally-concerned citizens in six countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2006

KNUT LEHRE SEIP ,
MIGUEL ALVAREZ COBELAS ,
SYLVAIN DOLEDEC ,
JINGHUA FANG ,
VAL H. SMITH  and
OLGA S. VORONTSOVA
KNUT LEHRE SEIP*
Affiliation:
Høgskolen i Oslo, Department of Engineering, Cort Adlersgt 30, 0254 Oslo, Norway
MIGUEL ALVAREZ COBELAS
Affiliation:
CSIC, Centro de Ciencias Medioambientales, Serrano 115 dpdo, E-28006 Madrid, Spain
SYLVAIN DOLEDEC
Affiliation:
University Claude Bernard, Lyon II, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France
JINGHUA FANG
Affiliation:
Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi, People's Republic of China
VAL H. SMITH
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Haworth Hall, University of Kansas, USA
OLGA S. VORONTSOVA
Affiliation:
Center for International Relations, 607190, Nizhny Novgorod Region pr. Mira 37, Sarov, Russia
*
*Correspondence: Professor Knut Lehre Seip Tel: +47 22 45 32 10 e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Implementation of measures to protect and improve the environment requires knowledge about people's preferences, both to ensure economic means and to gain public support for the measures. Since environmental legislation and protection measures become increasingly cross-national, knowledge of benefit perception among people across countries is important. This study addresses the aggregated preferences of environmentally-concerned individuals in France, USA, Norway, Russia, China and Spain. The aggregated preferences in all groups showed emphasis on pollution issues (rank 1 out of six issues in all six countries). The groups were least concerned with animal rights, which here included the right for top predators like tigers and wolf to roam the wilderness in a way that may cause statistical fatalities (rank 4–6). The group's concern for pollution decreased with the buying power of the country to which they belonged (r2 = 0.967). Also, agreement among the individuals in the groups tended to be less when the buying power was large (r2 = 0.940). The study shows that benefits accrued in one country may not have the same weight in another country, in particular if countries have different economic development status. It also suggests that efforts to preserve species diversity may require other types of public motivation than efforts to reduce pollution or to use non-renewable resources.

Keywords

benefit transfercomparative studyenvironmentpairwise comparisonpollutionpreferencesspecies right
Type
Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 288 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreoni, J. & Levinson, A.(2001) The simple analytics of the environmental Kuznets curve. Journal of Public Economics 80: 269–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayers, R.H.(1986) Christian realism and environmental ethics. Religion and Environmental Crisis, by Hargrove, E.C., pp. 154–170. Athens, GA, USA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Bockstael, N.E., Freeman III, A.M., Kopp, R.J., Portney, P.R. & Smith, V.K. (2000) On measuring economic values for nature. Environmental Science and Technology 34: 1384–1389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brennan, A.(2002) Environmental Ethics. Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bullock, C.H.(1999) Environmental and strategic uncertainty in common property management: the case of the Scottish red deer. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 42 (2): 235–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buschena, D., Anderson, T. & Leonard, J.L.(2001) Valuing nonmarket goods: the case of elk permit lotteries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 41: 33–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callicott, J.B., Crowder, B.L. & Mumford, K.(2000) Normative concepts in conservation biology: reply to Willers and Hunter. Conservation Biology 14 (2): 575–578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, T.A. & Englin, J.(1997) Respondents experience and contingent valuation of environmental goods. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 33: 297–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Czeh, B. & Krausman, P.R.(1997) Distribution and causation of species endangerment in the United States. Science 277: 1116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankenhauser, S., Tol, R.S.J. & Pearce, D.W.(1997) The aggregation of climate change damages: a welfare theoretical approach. Environmental and Resource Economics 10: 249–266.Google Scholar
Gifford, R.(1996) Environmental Psychology. Principles and Practice. Boston, USA: Allyn and Bacon.Google Scholar
Guilford, J.P.(1954) Psychometric Methods. New York, USA: McGraw-Hill Book Company.Google Scholar
Keeney, R.H. & McDaniels, T.L.(2001) A framework to guided thinking and analysis regarding climate change policies. Risk Analysis 21 (6): 989–1000.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keeney, R.L.(1992) Value Focused Thinking. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Keeney, R.L. & Raiffa, H.(1976) Decisions with Multiple Objectives. New York, USA: Wiley.Google Scholar
Kenyon, W. & Edwards-Jones, G.(1998) What level of information enables the public to act like experts when evaluating ecological goods? Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 41 (4): 463–475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le Nouvel, Observateur (2001) Atlas Economique Mondial 2001. Paris, France: Atlaséco.Google Scholar
Leopold, A.(1949) A Sand County Almanac. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Loomis, J.B.(1992) The evolution of a more rigorous approach to benefit transfer: benefit function transfer. Water Resources Research 28 (3): 701–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, G.(1956) The magical number seven plus minus two. Physiological Review 63: 81–97.Google ScholarPubMed
Ready, R., Navrud, S., Day, B., Duborg, R., Machado, F., Mourato, S., Spanninks, F. & Rodrigues, M.X.V. (2004) Benefit transfer in Europe: how reliable are transfers between countries? Environmental and Resource Economics 29: 67–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schläper, F. & Hanley, N.(2003) Do local landscape patterns affect the demand for landscape amenities protection? Journal of Agricultural Economics 54 (1): 21–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Selden, T.M. & Song, D.(1995) Neoclassical growth, the J curve for abatement, and the inverted U curve for pollution. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 29: 162–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharifi, M.A., van den Toorn, W., Rico, A. & Emmanuel, M.(2002) Application of GIS and multicriteria evaluation in locating sustainable boundary between the Tunari National Park and Cochabamba city (Bolivia). Journal of Multi-criteria Decision Analysis 11: 151–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, S., Castellan, J. & John, N. (1988) Nonparametric Statistics for Behavioural Sciences. New York, USA: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Wackernagel, M., Lewan, M.L. & Hansson, C.B.(1999) Evaluating the use of natural capital with ecological footprint. Applications in Sweden and subregions. Ambio 28: 604–611.Google Scholar
Walas, T., ed. (1995) Stereotypes and Nations. Kraków, Poland: International cultural center, Kraków.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Seip et al. supplementary material

Questionnaire

Download Seip et al. supplementary material(File)
File 57.9 KB