Bridging attitudes and evidence: climate change perspectives in Italy

Abstract

The most visible and well-known consequence of natural and environmental disasters is displacement. The paper analyzes environmentally induced displacement and attitudes towards climate change in Italy between 2013 and 2023. For this purpose, the Gradient Boosting Model (GBM) is used to analyze environmental displacement, while the Fuzzy-Hybrid TOPSIS is implemented to study climate change concerns. The results show that weather-related disasters are the most important casual climate effect on displacement. Furthermore, the issue of climate change is far from uniform and varies significantly across socio-economic factors such as age, education, religion, and income.