New publication in Sustainable Development

Our colleagues Ting Liu, Nick Shryane and Mark Elliot have published a new research article in the journal Sustainable Development. The paper investigates the effect of personal income on attitudes towards climate change risk, considering the mediator of responsibility attribution (RA) for climate change and the moderator of educational attainment.

The authors used a latent growth curve model applied to data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study dataset from 2009 to 2020 to find that personal income growth heightens the likelihood of expressing concern about climate change while reducing the propensity for holding sceptical or paradoxical attitudes over time.

They further report that "Attributing climate change to personal behaviour mediated the income-attitude relationship. Significant differences in the mediation effect were observed between individuals who had received a university education and those who had not, even after controlling for covariates such as age, sex, political affiliation, and employment status."

Liu, Shryane, and Elliot conclude that these findings suggest that a climate campaign emphasizing RA can address attitude disparities across income and education strata, further promoting sustainable climate action and mitigation.