The Silent Majority: Local residents’ environmental behavior and its influencing factors in coal mine area

Abstract

Abstract Although there are many studies of environmental behavior, local residents' environmental behavior in the coal mine area has a unique feature. This paper undertakes the first investigation of the vulnerable group in the coal mine area, China and aims to clarify the influencing factors of local residents’ environmental behavior. The differences of environmental behavior among different groups are divided by gender, age, educational level, proximity and household income using rank sum test. Furthermore, this paper discusses the effects of natural environment perception, social environment perception and environmental attitudes using the structural equation model. The results are as follow: most of the residents keep silent in the face of environmental pollution, and this is different from the Western environmental resistance behavior. No prior research has studied this silent group in the environmental behavior context. This study proves the heterogeneity in this association between socio-demographic and environmental behavior. Natural environment perception has a significant positive effect on environmental behavior. The environmental attitude has a significant negative effect on environmental behavior. Perception of the social environment has no significant effect on environmental behavior. The paper finally proposes that the government should consider these factors when it creates environmental policy.