Addressing climate change effectively requires policies that reduce the environmental impacts of energy use, transportation, and food consumption. People's lifestyles, encompassing their thoughts, behaviours and physical and social contexts, vary significantly and may influence their acceptance of environmental policies. Understanding public acceptance of environmental policies in these three sectors is crucial because public support is essential for their success. However, countries often look abroad for best practices on environmental policy and find it difficult to understand how public acceptance from other contexts may apply to their own due to differences in lifestyles and socio-demographic factors like age, gender, and income.
To tackle this issue, our research will analyse the 2022 OECD Environmental Policy and Household Behaviour (EPIC) survey, including 17,000 respondents from nine countries. We will use a person-centred approach called multilevel latent class analysis to:
1. Identify groups of people based on the similarity of their energy use, transportation, and food consumption lifestyles.
2. Assess how these groups vary between countries and regions within those countries.
3. Assess how socio-demographic factors predict membership in these groups.
4. Assess how these lifestyle groups influence support for environmental policies and how this relationship varies across countries.
5. Explore how lifestyles in one sector (e.g. energy) can predict lifestyles and policy support in another (e.g., food).
By doing this, we aim to provide a better understanding of the transferability of environmental policy acceptance across different lifestyle and socio-demographic groups, countries, and sectors.