Investigating how the occurrence and impacts of natural disasters are related to environmental concern

Environmental concern plays a central role in researching possibilities for reducing environmentally critical behaviour and reducing the ecological footprint. It has been found that both individual and context factors are related to environmental concern. Significantly, personal and national wealth has been found to be related to environmental concern. On the individual level, environmental concern is also related to political attitudes, gender, age, education, and social trust. On the national level, environmental concern, in addition to economic wealth, is related to population density. Much attention has recently been given to extreme weather events and other natural disasters, realizing that some of them are occurring more often or have more severe consequences due to global climate change. The relationship of these disasters with public opinion about environmental issues is complex to analyze. One problem is that public attention is sometimes only of short duration. Another is that attention is dependent on media coverage. However, increasing the number and severity of environmental disasters may lead to increased general awareness about environmental problems, and thus, investigating this issue on a long-term scale is promising. With data from the International Social Survey Programme, a period from 1993 to 2020 with four waves can be investigated. It contains survey questions about environmental concern, behavioral intention, attitudes toward the economy, and demographic information about the respondents. In addition, the individual-level survey questions from ISSP 2020 can help investigate if disasters affecting the individual's neighbourhood have an influence on environmental concerns. On the national level, information from the World Bank about GDP, population density, urban population, and income inequality can be included. Also, on the national level, data from EM-DAT (www.emdat.be) is used to analyze the relationship between natural disasters (e.g., storms, floods, extreme weather events, etc) in a country and the level of environmental concern. EM-DAT gives information about the number and relevance of disasters across the world from 1900 to the present, covering disasters that have at least ten fatalities, a hundred affected people, a declaration of emergency, or a call for international assistance.