Public acceptability of climate change mitigation policies: a discrete choice experiment

Abstract

The present study examines the public acceptability of the EU’s future climate change mitigation policies. Using the discrete choice experiment, the authors elicit the preferences of approximately 4098 respondents from the Czech Republic, Poland, and UK for the GHG emission reduction policies that differ in four attributes: emission reduction target, burden sharing across the EU Member States, the distribution of costs within each country, and cost. The three specific reduction targets analysed correspond to the EU 2050 Roadmap and deep decarbonization policy (80% target), the climate-energy 2014 targets (40% target), and the status quo policy (20% target); each will result in a specific emission trajectory by 2050. The results reveal stark differences between the three countries. Czechs would be on average willing to pay around EUR 13 per household per month for the 40% GHG emission reductions by 2030 or EUR 17 for 80% reductions by 2050, and the citizens of the UK are willing to pay about EUR 45. Conversely, the mean willingness to pay (WTP) of Polish households for achieving more stringent targets is not statistically different from zero. The WTP for adopting policies to reach the 40% and 80% targets are not statistically different in any of the examined countries. However, it was found that the preferences in all three countries are highly heterogeneous. In addition, an insight is provided into the preferred characteristics of the future GHG emission reduction policies.

Policy relevance

A detailed understanding of the acceptability of climate mitigation policies among the general public is crucial for identifying the potential for improvements in their design. This study examines the public acceptability of the EU’s future mitigation policies. The authors elicit preferences of respondents from three EU countries for three different emission trajectories and reduction targets through policy packages that include several options to share the burden among the EU Member States and to distribute the costs among citizens of each country. Preferences are analysed for each attribute and the willingness-to-pay values for several alternative policy packages are derived. The authors believe that understanding public acceptability can help support the successful implementation of climate mitigation policies.

Keywords:

• Burden sharing
• climate change mitigation policy
• consumer preferences
• cost distribution
• discrete choice experiments
• GHG emission targets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This trend has been later confirmed by more recent estimates, as emissions decreased to 23% below the 1990 levels in 2014 and the projections until 2020 stayed unchanged (EC, 2015b).

2. The effects of policy characteristics are interlinked with social-psychological variables mentioned above and hence the individual characteristics of the respondent (Kim, Schmöcker, Fujii, & Noland, 2013).

3. CAWI and CAPI data yield the same results in the Czech Republic; however, two different survey modes result in differences in Poland (see SI Appendix). It is highlighted that, due to the sampling strategy, the two sub-samples were not constructed in a way to allow analysing data separately.

4. Recall that preferences were elicited under the assumption that non-European countries ‘comply equivalently’.

5. Costs for a household are correlated with certain cost allocation rule, for instance, the proportional allocation linked to income will increase relative burden of a rich household, whereas lump sum allocation will be more penalizing poor. It was therefore examined whether the respondents connect the own costs with some cost distribution rule in order to ensure that the attributes are uncorrelated. By interacting income with attributes, it is found that deviations from mean income in the sample do not seem to significantly change the means of the parameter of cost distributions (the results are provided in SI Annex).

6. The authors examined whether results are affected by excluding respondents who protested against the contingent scenario, or who always chose stringent reduction targets but did not consider their costs. Only a minor effect on WTP was found, thus neither group of respondents is excluded from the main analysis. These results are reported in SI Annex.

7. The models were estimated using custom code developed in Matlab, which is made available from github.com/czaj/DCE under Creative Commons by 4.0 license. The maximum likelihood function was simulated using 10,000 Sobol draws (Czajkowski & Budziński, 2015), using different starting points and optimization techniques, to make sure it reached the global optimum.

8. SI Annex reports the WTP estimates using the parameter estimates from multinomial logit and mixed logit without correlated attributes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Program project CECILIA2050 (Choosing Efficient Combinations of Policy Instruments for Low-carbon development and Innovation to Achieve Europe's 2050 climate targets) [grant number 308680] and Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie [grant number 681228]. Data analysis was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number GA15-23815S] ‘Improving predictive validity of valuation methods by application of an integrative theory of behaviour’. Mikolaj Czajkowski gratefully acknowledges the support of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the National Science Center, and the Foundation for Polish Science. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Responsibility for any errors remains with the authors.