Percepción y preocupación ambiental en distintas regiones metropolitanas del Brasil: eslabones perdidos y evidencia adicional

This article reviews patterns of perception and environmental concern in different metropolitan areas of Brazil and how these are influenced by socioeconomic level and objective environmental conditions. Building on previous findings by Nawrotzki, Guedes and Carmoy (2014), we asked whether the relationship between socioeconomic status, objective environmental conditions and degree of concern involved differences in perception regarding environmental issues and stakeholders. We think that concern might be too abstract a concept to be freely used as a synonym for environmental attitude. Moreover, factors that precede a decision (such as environmental awareness and perception) and are key components of environmental concern were not taken into consideration by Nawrotzki, Guedes and Carmoy in their analysis. This time, we use a new data set gathered in 2007 from a representative sample of inhabitants of the metropolitan regions of Campinas and Baixada Santista in the São Paulo extended metropolitan region. These are the same data used in Nawrotzki, Guedes and Carmoy (2014). Expanding the idea of evaluating the environmental profile by adding environmental awareness and perception of environmental issues, along with environmental concern, we used latent class models including a random effect, assuming that these three environmental dimensions are related and should be modelled together as a dependent latent structure. The findings from our models indicate that objective environmental problems exacerbate the perception of environmental problems, although concern for the environment clearly depends on wealth. Some groups living in poverty thus face limitations when translating their perception of pressing environmental issues into a pro-environmental attitude.