Floridians’ Concern for the Everglades: the influence of environmental knowledge and cultural worldview on concern and perception of impact from various environmental threats

Abstract Public support for restoration in sensitive ecosystems like the Everglades depends in part on individual-level concern and perceptions of impact from environmental threats. This study examines the roles of environmental knowledge and factors associated with motivated reasoning – cultural worldview (CWV), political ideology, and voting behavior – on Floridians’ concern and the perceptions of impact for five different threats to the everglades. Two of these threats, sea level rise and changes in precipitation, are associated with climate change and thus ideologically entangled. Analysis of our sample of 1432 Floridians reveals that: (1) CWV is the factor associated with motivated reasoning that has the largest influence on environmental concern and perceptions of impact, except for in the case of sea level rise, for which voting behavior had the greatest influence, (2) environmental knowledge has a larger influence on perceptions of impact for environmental threats that are not ideologically-entangled (e.g. water quality), (3) factors driving motivated reasoning have a larger influence on perceptions of impact from threats that are ideologically-entangled (i.e. sea level rise and precipitation), and (4) those with Communitarian-Egalitarian worldviews hold higher levels of concern and perceived greater risk impacts on all but one of the threats (invasive species), although some differences become more nuanced when viewed over the distribution of environmental knowledge. These findings improve our understanding of the relationship between environmental knowledge, motivated reasoning, and public concern and perceptions of environmental impacts to a local resource and ecosystem.