Analysing spatially explicit perceptions of extreme weather events in Germany

Abstract

Presenters: Dennis Abel Stefan Jünger Climate change has become a central subject of social science research, with an increasing focus on extreme weather events as consequences of climate change. A growing number of georeferenced survey programs expands the opportunities for linking with geodata and satellite data, thus introducing natural experiments on causal explanations of a series of environmentally relevant variables. Several studies address the role of exposure to climate change and extreme weather events as an influencing factor for people's attitudes toward climate change and policy preferences. However, research yields mixed evidence. In particular, the mechanism between objective weather variation and changes in attitudes and behaviour often represents a black box. We contribute to the current research by investigating the relationship between the experience of weather extremes, evaluation of risks, and policy preferences. We aim to exploit the natural variation of extreme weather phenomena linked with newly gathered data on the local perception of weather patterns and policy preferences. Our questionnaire captures detailed perceptions of local and national risks due to extreme weather, climate change attribution, and policy preferences. The survey was conducted between November 2023 and January 2024 as part of the GESIS Panel, a self-administered probability-based mixed-mode (CAWI and PAPI) panel of the German-speaking adult population permanently residing in Germany with a total sample size of about 5,000 respondents. Our study employs these georeferenced survey items from the GESIS Panel and highly customizable weather data from the European Union's Earth Observation Programme Copernicus and the German Weather Service. Given the fine-grained spatial resolution of the GESIS Panel, we can identify site-specific effects. With this research project, we contribute to three major research gaps in the literature: 1. through the fine-grained spatial and temporal linking of the survey items with real-world weather patterns and the differentiation between different types of weather extremes, we will be able to address local experience of extreme weather events in detail; 2. given the panel structure of the core environmental study, we are also able to uncover changes in attitudes and policy preferences due to the experience of extreme weather events; 3. we uncover significant cognitive steps between the physical extreme weather experience and changes in attitudes, such as risk perception and the attribution to climate change