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

Abstract

Objectives: Climate change is one of the main challenges of our time, and public discourse aimed at fostering support for policies that address it often centers around its environmental impacts. However, a growing body of literature shows that the health impacts of climate change can be substantial, raising the question of whether individuals would be more willing to support policies that address these health impacts. In this study, we examine whether support for policies that mitigate the impacts of climate change differs across the health and environmental domains. Because climate change can potentially increase uncertainty and ambiguity about the future, and because its effects are distributed over time, we also examine how time preferences, risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion relate to support for such policies. Methods: We recruited 134 adults residing in Portugal to participate in an online survey that collected data on their sociodemographic characteristics, their perceptions and attitudes towards climate change, their willingness to accept tax increases aimed at mitigating adverse health and biodiversity outcomes associated with climate change, and a set of survey-based and incentivized measures of their risk aversion, ambiguity aversion, and time preferences. We measured time preference using a task based on Kirby et al. (1999), risk aversion using a task based on Holt and Laury (2002), and jointly measured risk and ambiguity aversion using a task based on Levi et al. (2010). We compared the distributions of the accepted tax increase to mitigate the health and biodiversity effects and estimated equations relating individual characteristics to policy support. Results: 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 or time 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 averse are less willing to accept these same tax increases. Conclusion: This study contributes to the literature by exploring how framing climate change in terms of its health versus environmental impacts influences public support for mitigation policies. We find that individuals do not significantly differentiate between health and biodiversity outcomes, that neither risk nor time preferences appear to play a significant role, and that higher ambiguity aversion is negatively associated with willingness to support such measures. We interpret these results as suggesting that communication and advocacy strategies that focus on health impacts, as opposed to environmental impacts, are unlikely to significantly alter public acceptance of policies aimed at addressing the effects of climate change.