The following text by Toralf Staud was first published on <link https: www.klimafakten.de meldung klimawandel-oesterreich-mehr-skeptiker-und-desinteressierte-als-deutschland-oder-der-schweiz internal link in current>klimafakten.de.
Climate change: More sceptics and disengaged people in Austria than in Germany or Switzerland
The large-scale research project European Social Survey (ESS) has surveyed views and attitudes on climate across 18 different countries. Several findings suggest that awareness of global warming is lower in Austria than in many other western European societies.
Doubts about the existence of climate change are apparently more widespread in Austria than in many other western European countries. While an overwhelming majority of the population in the Alpine republic also accepts the scientific findings on global warming, a comparatively visible minority of 7.3 per cent believe the climate is "probably not" or "definitely not" changing. This is according to data from the European Social Survey (ESS). By comparison, the figure in Germany is 4.5 per cent, and in Switzerland 3.7 per cent.
The ESS is a large-scale social science study that has been exploring opinions and attitudes on political and social issues every two years since 2002. A total of 36 countries have participated since the ESS was established; the exact number varies from round to round, and Austria has taken part in almost every survey. The eighth survey wave took place in 2016, with attitudes towards climate change and energy policy being examined for the first time. More than 34,000 citizens took part across Europe; in Austria, 2,010 people were interviewed by the Vienna-based IFES Institute between September and December 2016.
In Austria, almost as many people doubt climate change as in Poland
Since late October 2017, the entire dataset has been publicly accessible, and shortly before Christmas a team from the British National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) published an initial comparison of climate change attitudes across Europe. Now, for the first time, klimafakten.de has carried out a targeted and more detailed analysis of the Austrian ESS data on the topic. The responses to several questions suggest that Austrians are more sceptical or indifferent towards climate change than other western European societies.
One of these is the question mentioned at the outset: "Do you think the world's climate is changing?" On average across all ESS respondents in all 18 countries, 6.8 per cent answered "probably not" or "definitely not". The figures were particularly high in central and eastern European countries, such as the Czech Republic (12 per cent) or Estonia (9 per cent). The top spots were taken by Russia (16 per cent) and Israel (12.7 per cent). Austria, at 7.3 per cent, was almost on a par with Poland (7.5 per cent) — and higher than all other western European countries that participated in this ESS round (the lowest figures were in Iceland and Sweden, at 2.4 and 3.2 per cent respectively).
When it comes to the causes of current climate change, scepticism about the scientific consensus is also relatively high in Austria. While research makes it clear that human activity is the primary cause, as many as 7.9 per cent of Austrians in the ESS survey said that climate change was due "only" or "mainly" to "natural processes". This was only slightly above the overall ESS average (7.7 per cent), but noticeably higher than the figures in, for example, Germany (5.3 per cent) or Switzerland (5.5 per cent). Central and eastern European countries also recorded high figures for this question (Russia: 13.7 per cent, Estonia: 11.2 per cent, Czech Republic and Poland: 10.4 per cent each); but in Israel (14.4 per cent) and Norway (12.5 per cent), too, more than one in ten respondents held this view.
Relatively few Austrians feel a sense of responsibility for climate change
The ESS data also clearly show that general awareness of climate change is weaker in Austria than in, say, Germany or Switzerland. While 54.1 per cent of Swiss and 52.8 per cent of Germans said they had thought about global warming often, only 31.1 per cent of Austrians said the same. And just 28 per cent of respondents in Austria said climate change was causing them concern — compared with 30.9 per cent in Switzerland and 44.8 per cent in Germany.
It comes as little surprise, then, that Austrians also lag behind Germans and Swiss when it comes to questions about climate protection. Only 30.4 per cent of respondents in Austria feel a personal sense of shared responsibility for global warming — compared with 41 per cent in Germany and as many as 44.6 per cent in Switzerland. Support for higher taxes on fossil fuels is also weaker in the Alpine republic: while 47.6 per cent of Swiss respondents are "very" or "fairly" in favour of this policy measure, and 39.5 per cent in Germany, support in Austria amounted to just 31.9 per cent.
"The FPÖ has made anti-scientific positions socially acceptable"
Viennese political scientist Eva Zeglovits describes the findings as "not surprising". She is one of the managing directors of the IFES Institute and has long analysed, among other things, elections in Austria. She explains that Austria has, in the FPÖ, a right-wing populist party that has been very successful for decades, one that "quite openly" and "time and again" takes positions that contradict the state of climate research. For instance, party leader Hans-Christian Strache spread the myth in the summer of 2017 that people had once grown grapes in Greenland.
"It's typical of populists to question scientific findings. To claim that the elites are dictating to ordinary citizens what they should think and how they should behave," says Zeglovits. And when science is publicly questioned by prominent voices — Strache has since become Vice Chancellor in a coalition with the conservative ÖVP — such positions gain credibility. "I can imagine that they become, as it were, socially acceptable — and that perhaps the inhibition threshold for expressing these attitudes in surveys also drops."
