Climate-related health risks and the willingness to pay for climate-change mitigation

Abstract

Climate change is one of the main challenges of our time, and public support for mitigation policies often emphasizes environmental impacts. However, health impacts can also be substantial, raising the question of whether framing policies around health versus environmental effects influences support. This study examines whether policy support differs across these domains and how time preferences, risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion relate to willingness to accept climate-related tax increases. We recruited 134 adults in Portugal for an online survey collecting sociodemographic data, climate change attitudes, willingness to accept tax increases to mitigate health and biodiversity impacts and measures of risk, ambiguity, and time preferences. Time preferences were measured using a task based on Kirby et al. (1999), and risk and ambiguity aversion were jointly measured using a task based on Levi et al. (2010). We find no statistically significant difference in the distributions of the accepted tax increase to mitigate health effects of climate change and the accepted tax increase to mitigate biodiversity effects. Our results indicate that, across both domains, there is no statistically significant association between risk preferences and the willingness to accept tax increases to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, our findings suggest that those who are more ambiguity tolerant and more impatient are less willing to accept these same tax increases. This study contributes to the literature by examining how framing climate change in terms of health versus environmental impacts affects public support for mitigation policies. We find that individuals do not significantly differentiate between health and biodiversity outcomes, risk preferences play a minimal role, and higher ambiguity tolerance and impatience are negatively associated with willingness to support such measures. These results suggest that emphasizing health impacts, rather than environmental impacts, is unlikely to substantially change public acceptance of climate policies.