Worries about natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes can make people with right-leaning political views more open to making sustainable purchases, according to a new study.
The findings suggest a strategy to overcome political polarization around climate change and move a broader fraction of society towards climate action – but, say researchers, cultural context matters.
Sustainable products are getting more and more popular, but disproportionately among those on the political left. In order to address climate change and other environmental issues, pretty much everyone needs to be making sustainable consumer choices.
Previous work has shown that experiencing a natural disaster makes people, including those on the right, more likely to support green policies and politicians. Could it also shift personal consumer choices?
To explore this possibility, researchers analyzed survey data from a total of 40,495 people living in 24 countries across four regions: the United States, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, and Israel. The data came from previously conducted large-scale surveys, the Pew Center American Trends Panel and the European Social Survey.
The surveys included questions about political leanings, climate change beliefs, worries about natural disasters, and sustainable consumption behavior.
The analysis confirms that people on the right are less convinced of human-caused climate change, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This pattern holds in the U.S., Western Europe, and Israel, and is most pronounced in the U.S. However, the link between political ideology and climate beliefs is much weaker in Central and Eastern Europe. All of these findings are in line with those of previous studies.
In Western Europe, Israel, and the United States, right-leaning people who were more worried about natural disasters were also more likely to say they would make sustainable purchases (an electric vehicle in the Pew survey and efficient large appliances in the European Social Survey).
Among left-leaning people in these societies, worries about natural disasters didn’t have much impact on people’s sustainable consumption intentions, probably because this group proclaimed a pretty strong inclination towards sustainable consumption across the board.
“I was surprised by the extent to which that vulnerability to natural disasters had less of an impact on leftists compared to rightists,” says study team member Rebecca Chae, assistant professor of marketing at Santa Clara University in California. “While we anticipated differences based on political orientation, the magnitude of the differences was much greater than we expected.”
In Central and Eastern Europe, worries about natural disasters didn’t have a different effect on purchasing inclinations depending on people’s political affiliation. This may be because climate change is not politically polarized in the region, the researchers say (in fact, there is less emphasis on environmentalism and climate action in general compared to Western Europe and the U.S.).
The U.S. survey data also included questions about the motivations behind people’s purchasing choices. Analysis of the answers revealed that right-leaning people who are worried about natural disasters are inclined to make sustainable purchases out of environmental concern, rather than with the aim of saving money or a desire to keep up with trends.
“This suggests that, for rightists, the expectation of being directly impacted by climate change can override their established attitudes and foster more sustainable behavior with the goal of helping the environment,” the researchers write. “They do want to help the environment when their vulnerability to natural disasters is high.”
The researchers next wondered whether bringing natural disaster vulnerability to top of mind would influence people’s purchasing intentions. They tested this strategy by asking 997 U.S. residents from 15 tornado-prone states to read about tornadoes that had occurred that year in different areas.
Right-leaning people who read about tornadoes in their state that had happened in the last couple of months were more likely to say they planned to make sustainable purchases compared to those living in states where tornadoes had not occurred as recently.
Although purchasing intentions may not always translate into actual purchases (a subject for future investigation, the researchers say), they do measure “how motivated people are to engage in sustainable consumption, which can give us an indication of whether people will buy a sustainable product if the situation allows them to do so,” says study team member Rafay Siddiqui, also an assistant professor of marketing at Santa Clara University.
Highlighting people’s vulnerability to natural disasters could be a good strategy for encouraging right-leaning people in the U.S., Western Europe, and Israel to make sustainable purchases, the researchers conclude. But in Central and Eastern Europe, this messaging may not need to be tailored to a person’s political ideology.
Chae is now investigating other psychological factors that may help explain regional differences in the links between climate beliefs and sustainable behaviors. Future studies are also needed to look at the interaction between disaster vulnerability and sustainable consumption in other parts of the world, Siddiqui adds.
Source: Chae R.L. et al. “Vulnerability to natural disasters and sustainable consumption: Unraveling political and regional differences.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2025.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.
