All talk and no action? An analysis of environmental concern, income and greenhouse gas emissions in Switzerland

Private households play a significant part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is important to know which factors are related to emissions. However, most studies so far have focused on income, household size and other structural factors while neglecting the potential relevance of attitudinal variables such as environmental concern. Those studies that did examine environmental attitudes were mostly based on intentoriented measures of pro-environmental behavior instead of actual environmental impacts. The present study brings these lines of research together by analyzing the relationship between emissions, income and environmental attitudes within a framework of multivariate analysis. Furthermore, three specific emissions domains mobility, housing and food - are analyzed separately and the results are compared to those based on a scale of pro-environmental behavior. All analyses are based on data from a large representative general population survey, the Swiss Environmental Survey 2007 (n = 3369), and a subsequent life cycle analysis. The results clearly indicate that next to income, environmental concern is an important predictor of emissions, even when controlling for the effects of income.