As the COVID-19 virus spread across the globe at the start of 2020, governments focused (rightly so) on the global health threat at hand, attempting to find solutions to reduce the rapid escalation of cases, especially in Europe.

Subsequently, our attention was shifted away from other issues such as climate change (CC) and the environmental crisis, that were at the forefront of our agenda prior to the pandemic. However as we gradually started to cancel our flights and decrease our trips to the shops, entering lockdowns across the world, immediate effects of this global halt were felt on the environment. Witnessing the potential our actions had on reducing CO2 and Greenhouse gases emissions, I was particularly curious to discover whether public opinion would have been more inclined to support climate change policies, especially when a country was hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis.  

As the effect of lockdown on CC was immediate, I believed that public opinion would have shifted as rapidly after the first waves in Europe, in favour for CC policies. In addition, the EU was, and still is, struck particularly hard by the virus. This is why I used data published by the European Commission from 2019 and 2020, as they conducted their surveys during first waves of COVID-19 and lockdown restrictions. 

In my research, I used a difference in differences approach (robust linear regression analysis) to find out whether COVID-19 had had an impact on public opinion towards CC policies in Europe. As Italy had, in the early stages of the pandemic, the highest rate of contamination, I used their respondents as the ‘treated subjects’. Utilizing ten, less affected countries, (Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia) as my control countries, I tested to find significance.

Effectively, while I expected the support towards climate change policies to increase drastically in a country more affected by COVID-19 like Italy, the results only aligned with my expectation when using Bulgaria and Finland as control countries. The remaining results did not show sufficient significance, and even indicated that COVID-19 had had the reverse effect reducing the support for CC policies when using Denmark as the control country.

Evidently when studying any recent topics, researchers are faced with limitations. While the data provided by the European Commission gave me the opportunity to access surveys with large amounts of respondents and questions, secondary data sources have their flaws. As I went through the many questions of the yearly survey, I noticed that very few questions mentioned CC, the environment or sustainability.

That said, further studies reflecting on the effects of COVID-19 on public opinion towards the climate crisis were published in the later stages of my research by the European Investment Bank (EIB climate surveys). It exposed that CC was not, at the time, part of the top three challenges European citizens were concerned about, with COVID-19 understandably in first place (which would partly explain my results). However, the 2021/2022 edition revealed that CC and environmental concerns were back towards the top of the list, with renewable energies considered as one of the best solutions to tackle the climate crisis.

The European Commission and EIB climate surveys are amongst the few to provide vital information on public opinion towards the climate crisis, a topic that requires further research and attention.

cyprien.dumont@me.com

Useful links

 Link for the article: Impact of COVID-19 on greenhouse gases emissions: A critical review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721054267

Link to the European Commission Eurobarometer 92: https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/s2255_92_3_std92_eng?locale=en

Link to the European Commission Eurobarometer 93: https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/s2262_93_1_93_1_eng?locale=en

Explanation of the difference in differences approach: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/difference-in-differences

 Particularly recommended Link to the EIB climate surveys: https://www.eib.org/en/surveys/climate-survey/index.htm