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Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2022

The role of personal values and personality traits in environmental concern of non-industrial private forest owners in Sweden

Degnet, Mohammed B.; Hansson, Helena; Hoogstra-Klein, Marjanke A.; Roos, Anders

Abstract

Environmental benefits have become priority objectives for the management of forests, including for private forest owners in many countries. Understanding and promoting environmental-friendly private forest management requires a measure of environmental concern of forest owners and knowledge of factors that influence it. Such a measure allows to explore underlying motivations of forest owners to include environmental aspects in their forest management. This in turn helps in developing and implementing effective pro-environmental forestry policies. In this paper, we assess environmental concern in forest management of 226 non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners in Sweden. In particular, we sought to achieve a two-fold objective: a) to quantitatively explore the content and dimensionality of the environmental concern construct of forestry owners and b) to identify the association between environmental concern of forest owners and their personal values and personality traits. A principal factor analysis resulted in a two-dimensional environmental concern construct encompassing: environmental strategy and environmental orientation. Hierarchical seemingly unrelated regressions (SUREG) showed that personal values and personality traits help to explain environmental concern in forest management of NIPF owners. A better understanding of environmental concern of forest owners and its relation with individuals' attributes will help in better designing, framing and targeting of tailor-made interventions to promote environmental considerations in forest management.

Keywords

Environmental concern; Non-industrial private forest owners; Family forests; Personal values; Personality traits; Exploratory factor analysis

Published in

Forest Policy and Economics
2022, Volume: 141, article number: 102767

      SLU Authors

    • Sustainable Development Goals

      SDG15 Life on land
      SDG12 Responsible consumption and production

      UKÄ Subject classification

      Forest Science
      Applied Psychology

      Publication identifier

      DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2022.102767

      Permanent link to this page (URI)

      https://res.slu.se/id/publ/117541