What Make People More Likely to Take Personal Action for Climate Mitigation? Taking the Case of Energy Consumption in Europe

Studies tend to show the increasing awareness for climate change and the need to mitigate it. Last year, protests against taxes on fossil fuels suggested that people are not willing to bear the costs of such mitigation. However, people also protested globally, claiming their will to take action and potentially change lifestyles. Yet, energy consumption is one of the main drivers of climate change and can’t be addressed without citizen’s support. This paper will aim at studying the factors influencing people to limit their energy consumption, given their political, climate change and energy beliefs as well as their socio-demographical features. It can be used for policy making while trying to address lack of awareness and looking for targeted campaigns for instance. Using an ordinal logit model, fitted to data collected in 2016 on 44 387 individuals in 23 European countries, we show that feeling responsible for climate change and being worried about energy affordability are key predictors of energy reduction behaviours. Politics play a small part as well and should be studied more accurately on a country-level