Do spatial climate messages increase pro-environmental engagement? Evidence from a survey experiment on public transport

ABSTRACT

Using a survey experiment among a special sample composed of art house cinema visitors, we investigate whether spatial climate messages increase subjects' willingness to pay for an inclusion of public transport fares in cinema tickets as well as their willingness to use public transport in case such a combined ticket is introduced. Based on previous findings, we expect emphasizing the positive impact of public transport usage on the local level to have a greater effect on subjects' preferences for public transport than a message that highlights the global consequences. Contrary to these expectations, our results show that the global treatment increases subjects' willingness to pay compared to the local treatment and the baseline. Both treatments increase subjects' willingness to use public transport. Conducting a sub-sample analysis, we find that also the local message increases the willingness to pay for a combined ticket among respondents who lack a financial interest as they already own a season ticket for public transport.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change communication
• contingent valuation
• pro-environmental behaviour
• non-monetary preferences
• public transport
• survey experiment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C93
• Q51
• R41

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the staff of the BALi cinema and the Solarcampus team (Florian Borchers, Astrid Dannenberg, Julia Kirchmann, Nadine Maier, Johanna Nöh, Thu Trang Phan, Josephine Plaum, Mario Sicenica, Christian Weber, and Heike Wetzel) for their support and engagement in planning and conducting the survey.

Table A1. Summary Statistics.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 For example in Munich, where a campaign from 2020 stated that ‘every passenger is a protector of the climate’ (https://www.mvg.de/mobilitaetsmacher.html, accessed 20.07.2021, German only) or in Hamburg, where the slogan ‘Get on board with climate protection’ (https://steigeinbeimklimaschutz.de/, accessed 20.07.2021, German only) is used as part of the larger campaign of the German federal railroad ‘This is Green’ from 2017 (https://gruen.deutschebahn.com/en, accessed 20.07.2021).

2 The Rhein-Main Transport Authority advertises combined tickets as ‘easy on the purse and easy on the nerves’. They connect ‘football fans, opera lovers, dancing queens, watersports junkies, rock chicks and sports fanatics’ because ‘they all use public transport to get to the match or take their seats at the opera’ (https://t1p.de/soju, accessed 04.11.2020).

3 The period ended over one month before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020 (WHO 2020) and Germany introduced its first measures to contain the pandemic.

4 Two previous surveys provided us with data about the usual visitor of this art house cinema (Dannenberg, Johansson-Stenman, and Wetzel 2021).

5 Due the fact that most visitors arrived in groups shortly before the start of the movie, we were not able to ask all visitors for their participation. Although we do not have numerical evidence, the impression of the surveyors was that very few people who were asked to participate declined the invitation.

6 For a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the CV method see for example McFadden and Train (2017), or Oerlemans, Chan, and Volschenk (2016).

7 Policy consequentiality denotes a condition where respondents perceive that their answers might affect a relevant outcome. Payment consequentiality denotes a condition where respondents expect at a chance greater than zero that they actually will have to pay for the valued good (Herriges et al. 2010).

8 Kabaya (2020) show that higher perceived payment consequentially reduces respondents WTP, whereas scripts targeting policy consequentially significantly increase respondents WTP. Therefore, they argue that both, payment and policy consequentiality are needed for revealing true preferences.

9 On hypothetical bias and its mitigation, see for example the studies and discussion by Loomis (2011), Herriges et al. (2010), Vossler and Watson (2013) or Penn and Hu (2018).

10 32 respondents indicated that their use of public transport would decrease or even drop to zero in case a combined ticket is introduced. We suspect that they misunderstood the question and stated their intended additional usage. As we cannot be sure that this explanation is correct, we excluded these observations. Our main results are unaffected.

11 The translated survey form can be found in Appendix 2.

12 Including three respondents who stated having arrived by an electric car.

13 The summary statistics of all elicited variables by treatment and test results for equality across treatments can be found in Table A1 in the appendix.

14 We used the linear Cragg Hurdle model (‘churdle linear’) in Stata 14 and the ‘margins’ command to compute the marginal effects.

15 In contrast to separately estimating a probit and a tobit model, the hurdle model allows to jointly analyse these correlated decisions while accounting for the possibility that the expression of a positive WTP and the actual level of the WTP are influenced by different factors (Needham and Hanley 2020).

16 In general, public transport season ticket holders have a higher WTU than non-holders. However, at equal levels of prior public transport usage to the cinema, non-holders have a financial incentive to increase their future usage when a combined ticket is introduced, while ticket holders do not. This explains the negative coefficient of Ticket holder in column (4).

17 The baseline category here is city centre, where the cinema is located.

18 An interaction effect between the treatment indicators and the indicator for season ticket holders in the full-sample regressions is not statistically significant on any conventional level.

Additional information

Funding

The work was financially supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, action ERC-2014-STG, Project HUCO [grant number 636746].