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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]
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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

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