Climate change awareness: Empirical evidence for the European Union

Highlights: • We assess public attitudes on climate change in Europe over the last decade. • We find that environmental concern is directly related to per capita income. • Social trust, education, media coverage, demographic and political factors also matter • Similarly GHG emissions, warming temperatures and damages caused by extreme weather. In this paper, we assess public attitudes on climate change in Europe over the last decade. Using aggregate figures from the Special Eurobarometer surveys on Climate Change, we find that environmental concern is directly related to per capita income, social trust, secondary education, the physical distress associated with hot weather, media coverage, the share of young people in the total population, and monetary losses caused by extreme weather episodes. It is also inversely related to greenhouse gas emissions, relative power position of right-wing parties in government and tertiary education. Moreover, we find a significant, opposite impact for two dummies for years 2017 and 2019, which we respectively associate with the effects of Donald Trump's denial campaigns and the U.S. Paris Agreement withdrawal announcement, and Greta Thunberg's environmental activism.