By Zélie Gankon.
Public discourse on climate change has extended beyond scientific realms, permeating various networks and media platforms. This study investigates the drivers of climate change opinion, with a particular focus on extreme weather events. To conduct this study, I use a worldwide data set from a recent Meta survey conducted on Facebook, combined with information on extreme weather events from the EM-DAT database. Specifically, I examine how country-level occurrences of such events influence climate awareness and risk perception. The descriptive statistics reveal distinct patterns in climate awareness and risk perception between Global North and Global South countries, which shape the outcomes of the estimations. The findings underscore the significant effect of exposure to extreme weather events—measured by the recurrence of such events over a decade—on individual risk perception, though no significant link is found with climate awareness. Interestingly, the distance to the trend of event occurrences shows a positive correlation with climate awareness but a negative relationship with risk perception. Further heterogeneity analyses complement the main regressions, exploring variations across different time lags for weather events, country frequency groups, and demographic categories such as age and gender.