What does the public associate with “climate change”? A study of open-ended survey questions from 2013 to 2021

Abstract

Tackling climate change requires a multitude of policy, technological, and behavioral responses, some of which will be felt clearly by the public and potentially need direct public support. It is therefore important to know how people think about climate change. In this study, we present people’s associations with climate change over close to a decade, from 2013 to 2021, in the form of responses to an open-ended question on climate change. To our knowledge, this combination of time series data and quantitative text analysis has not been used before. We pay separate attention to young people’s associations, the associations of those most and least worried about climate change as well as associations with climate change between men and women. We find broad continuity in the topics covered by the responses, but also new emphasis on natural hazards and potentially their human causes.