Between Crisis and Continuity: Public Opinion on Environmental Crises (BeCriCo)

Whether it’s climate change, biodiversity loss, or the energy transition – public perceptions are key to understanding when and how environmental change and its consequences are interpreted and politicized as a crisis. Research finds that public support for effective implementation of environmental policy measures is essential to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Politicians have increasingly pointed to public opinion to justify their policy choices on environmental crises and climate change with a reference to public opinion polls. Then-chancellor Olaf Scholz, for example, stated in the summer of 2023 that “every single piece of legislation” in climate policy must be able to win a majority in an imagined popular referendum. This is in line with the “public as a thermostat” argument of Wlezien (1995).

Despite the importance of public opinion polls and the plethora of data available, experience in interpreting (and presenting) survey results and methodology as well as the understanding of data quality and the data’s potential pitfalls and limitations is sometimes limited. Surveys can shape political narratives about societal consensus or division – but they may differ significantly, for instance in sampling method, survey mode, question wording or field period. Furthermore, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures can involve very different political and administrative levels, from the transnational (e.g., international agreements) to the national, state or local (e.g., funding schemes, citizen wind farm, communal heat action plan) and affectedness by, for instance extreme weather events or pollution might vary by locality. To obtain meaningful insights, data on public opinion regarding these policies need to cover the affected areas, which gets more challenging the lower the level (e.g. because of data protection requirements, data availability).

The suggested project seeks to address these gaps: it assumes that an exchange is needed between those that conduct scientific research on public opinion, those who collect survey data, and those who consume or work with this data outside of academia.