Environmental Concern and Behavior: Do Personal Attributes Matter?

Pro-environmental conducts are different from pro-environmental opinions, given the fact that there is not a strict relationship between meaning something and acting according to those principles. The aim of this paper is to examine the attitudinal factors which determine the concern for the environment as well as four environmentally friendly behaviors, while trying to account for the heterogeneity of pro-environment attitudes. What we found is there is a set of characteristics which determine the willingness to take pro-environmental actions: women, marriage, higher education, public employment, higher levels of religiosity, having a left-party ideology and belonging to a trade union are positively correlated with environmentally friendly behaviors. Younger individuals tend to take more environmentally friendly actions compared to older respondents. In general, attitudes and behaviors do not differ between groups of countries. In a second stage, we studied the joint effects of expressing concern and taking environmentally friendly attitudes.