Editor's Introduction Environmental Concern in International and Cross-National Context: Insights and Challenges for Future Research

Research reveals environmental concerns to be important in public opinion surveys and polls worldwide. Simultaneously, research reveals questions that remain and areas ripe for inquiry, yielding insights to inform and pose challenges for future investigations. For instance, although environmental concerns are prominent, they differ across national and cultural contexts and are composed of many multidimensional facets. In this introduction, I provide a brief overview of research on environmental concern that highlights national, international, and comparative research, major themes and theories investigated, and measures of environmental concern examined in these works. I place special emphasis on comparative and cross-national work published in the past decade as background for discussion of secondary data sets available for analyzing environmental issues and concerns comparatively. I then briefly outline how the articles in this issue fit within this broader context and provide important groundwork for future theoretical and empirical work.