The climate policies that EU citizens like (and those they don't)
European citizens show greater support for climate change mitigation policies that allocate subsidies for rail transport or home insulation, among others, while they strongly oppose policies that foresee any kind of tax on polluting behaviors, such as those on cars and meat.
This is revealed by a survey conducted by an international scientific team aimed at determining the extent to which European citizens are willing to support the different kinds of climate policies currently under discussion.This new survey, carried out within the EU-funded research project CAPABLE and involving the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), shows that 70% of the European population would support the creation of an EU Rail Fund, while 55% would support both household insulation mandates and banning private jets.
The creation of an EU Railway Fund could allow the expansion of the rail network and lower the cost of train fares within Europe by 50%. Similarly, residential building insulation measures by 2040 would allow compliance with a minimum energy efficiency standard, on the condition that the government pays at least half of the cost for low-income households.
According to Keith Smith at ETH Zurich, lead researcher of these surveys, “these policies are likely to have greater acceptability across the EU and can present more low-hanging fruit opportunities for policymakers".
The results show that certain policies are seen negatively by a vast majority of the public in all countries surveyed. Among these, taxes—such as those on beef or flights—stand out. Bans or taxes on fossil fuel cars receive the lowest scores.
These results are now browsable in an online tool which allows the user to analyze and compare opinions about a set of different climate policies in Europe.
Across countries, some wide differences are noticeable. Southern European countries, such as Greece, France and Italy, show support for at least five of the policies proposed, while overall the level of support is lower in Eastern European countries, like Poland and the Czech Republic.
Looking closer into socio-demographics, women, higher-educated individuals, and younger persons are nevertheless consistently more willing to support all the climate policies queried across all the countries surveyed.
“These preliminary results highlight important heterogeneity in support for climate policies in Europe, but also a potential way to garner majority support for effective climate action”, adds Johannes Emmerling, coordinator of the CAPABLE project. These findings highlight the diversity of climate policy support, emphasizing the need for a tailored and multidimensional policymaking approach to develop robust constituencies for feasible and effective measures.
The results presented in this press release are part of a large-scale survey about the opinions of European citizens on climate policies. The data was collected between 24 June and 27 August 2024, and include responses from 19,328 individuals representing the general populations of Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Participants completed a survey on climate change and politics, which included expressing their opinions on 15 climate change mitigation policies. These 15 policies were selected based on their relevance to ongoing policy debates and existing climate strategies within the EU. For each policy proposed, participants indicated their level of support on a 7-point Likert scale: from strongly opposing a particular policy to strongly supporting it.