New Publication: "Global warming expectations of German firm representatives are overly optimistic, uncertain, and easily influenced"

"Our results imply that the majority of respondents have a high degree of uncertainty and limited knowledge regarding climate change and appear easily influenceable."

In their latest publication “Global warming expectations of German firm representatives are overly optimistic, uncertain, and easily influenced”, Dominik Schober and Claudia Schmiedeberg examine how German business representatives assess future global warming. They analize German firm representatives’ expectations and effects of the firms’ policy affectedness and engagement, and firm representatives’ knowledge using an information treatment experiment.

The analysis is based on data collected as part of the “Bundesbank Online Panel - Companies” (BOP-F), which targets a representative sample of 9,227 companies in Germany. As part of the panel, respondents were asked to estimate the likelihood of five described scenarios relating to climate change, which varied in their extent of global temperature increase. Before answering this, a random 50% of respondents received an information treatment in the form of global warming temperatures, which are considered unlikely and very unlikely by climate scientists.

The results show that expectations are often too optimistic and strongly characterized by uncertainty. The information treatment leads to a decrease in such uncertainty, causing respondents to give less scattered answers. This provides evidence for uncertainty, which is driven by limited knowledge of the consequences of climate change. Business representatives of less engaged companies in particular react clearly to the information treatment, while representatives of engaged companies make more well-founded and stable assessments. This leads the authors to consider an increase in engagement, potentially through political measures, as a tool for decreasing uncertainty in relation to the effects of climate change among business representatives.

The full publication in npj Climate Action is available here.