Greening lifestyles with good intentions: Cross-country evidence on the association between intention to act and environmentally significant actions

In a context of heightened awareness of the dangers of climate change, the environmental impact of contemporary lifestyles has come under increasing scrutiny. Previous research has built solid evidence on the considerable potential individuals possess to intervene, their widespread willingness to do so but also the sizeable barriers they face to reduce their environmental footprint. In this study we investigate whether pro-environmental attitudes can serve as potent drivers of individual actions with consequential environmental impact. Bridging across work in several disciplines, we address directly the association between intent to act and a range of actions and scale up the analysis to a cross-country setting using European Union data and multilevel latent class models. We find a strong, positive association which holds beyond standard sociodemographic and country-level controls. We interpret the robustness of the intent-actions association as a positive signal on its likelihood to foster behavioral change with high environmental impact. A country's economic development and affluence affect the association whereas sociodemographic differences exhibit considerable variability on both intent and actions and are generally contingent on contextual factors. This, we argue, is evidence of the limits of mitigation strategies that focus exclusively on behavioral change without consideration of countrylevel characteristics.