Factual information on the environmental impacts of consumption abroad increases citizens' problem awareness, but not support for mitigating such impacts

Abstract

Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a gap in knowledge among citizens, and how closing this gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N = 8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major gap in knowledge among the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the information gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy.