The geography of responses to heat risk: linking decision maker and public perceptions

Extreme heat continues to negatively affect the health and wellbeing of millions of people globally. The way people and policy-makers perceive heat risks is likely to influence their protective responses to extreme heat. In this project, the investigators will assess how populations perceive heat risks and engage in response behaviors and will situate these against how policy and decision makers understand their constituents’ perceptions and behaviors. By doing so, the investigators will bridge the gap between how extreme heat risk and heat-protective behavioral response options are being perceived by the public and how they are perceived and managed by decision makers. This project contributes to broader efforts to build resilience to extreme heat by local and regional governments. New knowledge generated in this project has the potential to improve heat governance, inform heat warnings and risk communication, and design more effective public health interventions. The project includes research to help those who are most vulnerable to heat and other types of weather hazards as well as the decision and policy makers responsible for reducing these systemic vulnerabilities. This project contributes to theoretical and methodological advances in geography and behavioral sciences and their intersection in a risk context. By collecting and downscaling representative survey data to determine geographic variations in heat response combined with decision-maker surveys to better understand their perceptions and beliefs about their constituents, the investigators will examine risk perceptions and responses to heat across different levels of heat governance. This project will integrate emerging quantitative techniques for spatial analysis and modeling of representative social survey data from national to local scales with surveys of policy and decision-makers. The investigators leverage the strengths of representative survey data and small-area estimation using multilevel regression and poststratification to produce national, state, and local estimates of public perceptions and responses to heat risk. This approach provides a baseline from which to understand how decision- and policy-makers responsible for heat governance understand their own constituents’ perceptions and responses and incorporate them into heat planning and response efforts. Two workshops and one symposium gather researchers and stakeholders to synergize learning and ideas across research projects on human and geographic dimensions of extreme heat. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.