Wealth as an obstacle and a support for environmental protection

Wealthy populations appear prone to protecting the environment. By contrast, wealthy individuals appear prone to harming it. In other words, wealth appears to have opposing effects on the environmental protection efforts of individuals and populations. In our secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data ( N = 27,998) from 28 countries, we demonstrate that wealth represents a behavioral benefit that supports populations’ efforts to protect the environment (e.g., via government subsidies). Wealth also represents a behavioral benefit that supports individuals’ efforts to protect the environment (e.g., by making effective home insulation affordable), but it simultaneously represents a behavioral cost that appears to prevent individuals from protecting the environment (e.g., by making excessively large homes affordable). We conclude that when behavioral scientists recognize that wealth can be a cost and a benefit simultaneously, they will ultimately understand when and why populations and individuals engage in environmentally protective actions or fail to do so. • Wealth effects are not perplexing when wealth’s behavioral relevance is understood • When engaging in behavior, individuals typically have to incur costs • For individuals, personal motivation must countervail costs that obstruct behavior • A population’s behavior indicates how supportive the conditions are for action • For populations, a surplus in money helps furnish behavior-supportive conditions • Wealth helps populations protect the environment, but helps and hinders individuals