Public awareness and willingness to pay for tackling smog pollution in China: a case study

In recent years, smog has become one of greatest challenges in China and many other countries. However, there are limited attentions of measuring public environment awareness of air pollution and the relations between public environmental awareness and smog prevention in a Chinese context. This study was designed to investigate the facts of public environmental awareness in a typical city of China after the serious smog in the beginning of 2013. The relationship between willingness to pay (WTP) of the residents for tackling smog pollution and their knowledge of the health hazard of smog was also explored. We found that most of respondents heard of smog mainly from news and thought that human activities are the main causes of heavy smog. Around 60% of the respondents wanted to support activities for coping with smog. Using public transportation (77.67%) and using energy saving appliances (72.74%) are environmentally friendly measures that most respondents wanted to practice. The average WTP for self-protection after information disclosure was significantly higher than that before information disclosure. The WTP for supporting smog control and preventive actions before and after information disclosure showed the same trend as WTP for self-protection. However, people wanted to pay more for self-protection than for supporting smog control and preventive actions, which indicated that individuals tend to think that the government should have more roles in smog control and prevention. The factors of age, occupations, education, and income had impacts on the WTP of the residents, but education and income were the most significant. This research suggested that enhancing public environmental education and providing accessible environmental knowledge to residents for tackling smog pollution are of great importance. The knowledge provided by this paper may contribute to smog prevention especially from a public participation perspective. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved