Abstract
Environmental issues, sustainability, and climate change have become the targets of many policies from international and governmental organizations including the EU’s European Green Deal action plan. This plan provides tools to address them—which include support for the circular economy, implementation of energy and environmental taxes, and investment in environmental protection—with the aim of favoring the well-being of EU citizens. In this context, this study analyses the impact of several parameters (environmental matters, global warming, circular economy, energy and environmental taxes, and expenditure and investment on the environment) on life satisfaction, or subjective well-being, and their effects on 33 European countries. For this purpose, four econometric models were carried out using data collected from the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Values Study (EVS), and the World Bank and Eurostat, reflecting subjective citizen satisfaction data. The findings present a highly significant inverse relationship between life satisfaction variables and both environmental problems and energy taxes. Additionally, there is a highly significant positive relationship between circular economy, environmental tax, and environmental protection expenditure parameters and life satisfaction variables, as well as, to a lesser degree of significance, with noise pollution from neighbours.
Highlights
The deterioration of the environment and unsustainability of resources are among the main global issues in this millennium owing to the serious risks they pose to ecosystems, human health, and the economy on a planetary scale
The analysis of the effect of the environmental variables analyzed is in line with the theoretical framework of this research; model 1 shows a significant negative effect p < 0.01 of pollution, grime, or other environmental problems with life satisfaction measured as the percentage of citizens with satisfaction values equal to or higher than 8 of −0.829 and of air pollution (ENV_PM10) of −0.153, with a lower significance p < 0.1
It would be interesting to go deeper into this topic, which in our case shows a direct relationship between life satisfaction and noise pollution (ENV_poln) with a significance of p < 0.05, indicating that those countries with higher noise from their neighbors in the street have a higher percentage of citizens with satisfaction higher than 8
Summary
The deterioration of the environment and unsustainability of resources are among the main global issues in this millennium owing to the serious risks they pose to ecosystems, human health, and the economy on a planetary scale. The EGD goes further— it is an ambitious growth strategy to turn the challenges of mitigating global warming and environmental degradation into opportunities to transform the current EU socioeconomic model into another more equitable and prosperous model, supported by a modern economy, in which economic growth is decoupled from the use of environmental resources. All this without leaving behind the people or territories within the European territory. It aims to achieve a sustainable future from the triple perspective of economic, social, and environmental
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