Trust, knowledge, and risk appraisal as predictors of protective behavior during smog crisis in Lahore

Lahore, the capital city of Punjab Province in Pakistan, has been ranked as the city with worst air quality in 2023 and 2024. The decreasing level of air quality has created severe consequences for human health, mobility, and economy. While provincial government has announced several measures over the years to combat rising air pollution: however, the situation has continued to worsen. To protect human lives, researchers have suggested adaptation to the smog exposure because mitigation and adaptation serve complementary roles across different timescales, with adaptation offering more immediate protective solutions. The goal of this study was to determine impact of threat and coping appraisal on protective behavior of the individuals using Protection Motivation Theory. Furthermore, study also determined the role of trust on information sources and knowledge about the smog in association with threat and coping appraisal. A 42-item self-administered questionnaire was used in a cross-sectional study of 913 respondents. The structural correlations between the research variables were examined using structural equation modelling (SEM). The result of SEM show that trust and knowledge are significantly associated with both threat appraisal (threat severity and vulnerability) and coping appraisal (self-efficacy and response efficacy). In turn, all four appraisals are significantly related to protective behavior: threat severity (β = 0.114, p < 0.001), threat vulnerability (β = 0.076, p < 0.01), self-efficacy (β = 0.170, p < 0.001), and response efficacy (β = 0.131, p < 0.001). The model explains 54% of the variance (R2 = 0.54) in protective behavior. These cross-sectional findings indicate that enhancing trustworthiness of information may improve risk appraisals, however, causal inferences require longitudinal verification.