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Public opinion on climate change is complex, comprising aspects such as belief, support for policies, and issue salience. This multidimensional nature of climate opinion can be accounted for by identifying "publics," each comprising people with similar climate attitudes. Climate opinion has also been found to relate strongly to political worldviews, with people holding conservative attitudes tending to have low levels of engagement with climate change. However, few studies have investigated how political worldviews relate to membership of climate publics. The current study therefore identifies climate publics in New Zealand and Australia and investigates how they relate to economic and social aspects of conservative worldviews. Using an original online survey, I find no clear link between economic conservatism and membership of climate publics. Social conservatives, however, are more likely to be members of publics with low levels of climate engagement and of "middle" publics, which accept the science of climate change but are "lukewarm" on climate action. Climate opinion appears to be more polarized in Australia than New Zealand. These results provide insight into the worldviews of people in the "mainstream" of climate opinion and suggest that only a minority of the public are demanding ambitious climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have debated why people on the right of politics are consistently found to be less likely to support environmental action than those on the left. Some authors argue that this relationship is primarily driven by conservative economic attitudes, while several studies have demonstrated a negative link between conservative social attitudes and environmental attitudes. However, as few studies include both conservative economic and social attitudes, it remains unclear whether both sets of attitudes relate to environmental attitudes independently, or whether one confounds the other. This study uses Bayesian regression analyses of data from the 2017 New Zealand election study, finding that both conservative economic attitudes (free market support, opposition to welfare) and conservative social attitudes (exclusionary attitudes, right-wing authoritarianism) have independent negative relationships with environmental attitudes. These results imply that the link between conservative ideology and environmental attitudes is as much about social attitudes and worldview as about economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-country research on public opinion on climate change has mostly focused on people's beliefs about whether climate change is happening or is a serious problem, with little attention paid to other opinion dimensions such as issue salience. Relying on Eurobarometer data from 28 EU member states, we systematically compare the public's belief in and salience of climate change, examining variation across the EU using Bayesian multilevel analysis. We find high levels of belief but low levels of salience in most countries. Salience varies substantially between countries and is positively related to country wealth. Levels of greenhouse gas emissions appear to have a negative relationship with both belief and salience, and individuals' political orientation has more influence on climate opinion (particularly salience) in richer countries than in poorer countries. Overall, our findings suggest that belief and salience are distinct dimensions, and that country context influences salience more than belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics is critical to understanding the pathways to a sustainable future. In recent years, a scholarly field has emerged, seeking to understand whether transitions towards more sustainable societies and economies occur and, if so, how they unfold. However, this field has not always fully incorporated the role of politics in shaping discourses, institutions and economic visions, or considered regions outside of Europe and North America. In this introduction to the special issue, we briefly review the field of sustainability transitions, highlighting the need to better capture the role played by political factors, institutions and (debates on) economic innovations in these transitions. We explain that sustainability is a contested concept, with two dominant conceptualisations: weak and strong sustainability. The framework of sustainability transitions allows us to position the contributions of the articles included in this special issue, which examine governance and institutions, media discourses, the role of industry and alternative economic models. The special issue focuses on two jurisdictions infrequently discussed in the literature on sustainability transitions: New Zealand and Australia. The special issue thus contributes new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the role of politics, political institutions and economic visions in sustainability transitions in the South Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate policy across the developed world remains inadequate, despite high levels of concern about climate change among the public. Yet public opinion on climate change is complex, with individuals differing on three key opinion dimensions: belief and concern, issue salience, and support for government action. In this study, we investigate how these dimensions intersect at the individual level. Based on data from an online survey conducted in 2018 in the United Kingdom (N = 787), a latent class analysis reveals that there are five climate change opinion publics. The two largest publics have strong beliefs that climate change is occurring, but view it as a low salience issue, or are wary of government action to address it. We also investigate sociopolitical covariates of each public. By providing a detailed picture of climate change views, these findings can help us to better understand the relationship between public opinion and climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]