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.

Heat Risk Image

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.

Principal Investigators

Olga Wilhelmi

Head of GIS Program, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Olga Wilhelmi is a geographer whose research interests focus on interactions among weather, climate and society across scales, with the main emphasis on understanding societal risk, vulnerability and adaptive capacity to extreme weather events and climate change.  She is a project scientist in the Research Application Laboratory and is the head of NCAR's Geographic Information Science Program. Olga is a graduate of Lomonosov Moscow State University where she majored in physical geography. She completed her Ph.D. in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1999. Olga has been leading and participating in numerous research activities and has written peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and reports addressing societal aspects of weather extremes and climate change; urban extreme heat and human health; drought vulnerability and water management; extreme precipitation events and flash floods; and the methodologies for integration of physical and social sciences in a GIS.

Mary Hayden

Research Professor, Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Dr. Hayden's work focuses on the intersection of weather, climate and health with an emphasis on vector-borne diseases. She is a Research Professor with the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience, adjoint faculty at the University of Colorado Denver, School of Public Health, a Guest Researcher with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and an affiliate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Hayden’s research interests include a range of interdisciplinary topics focused on the integration of the physical and social sciences in the study of climate-sensitive health issues. This includes an emphasis on the human behavioral component at the intersection of weather, climate, and health with a focus on vector-borne diseases and extreme heat.

Peter Howe

Assistant Professor, Department of Environment and Society, Utah State University

Peter D. Howe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment and Society. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Dr. Howe is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist with roots in human-environment geography and geographic information science. His research focuses on the intersection of human decision making with climate change and environmental hazards, using large-scale social surveys, geo-spatial analysis, statistical modeling, and geovisualization. In 2018, Dr. Howe received a 5-year National Science Foundation CAREER award to model the dynamics of public perceptions and behaviors in the context of climate change adaptation, and he was a recipient of the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He serves on the leadership team for the $2.7M NSF Climate Adaptation Science graduate research traineeship program at USU. Dr. Howe’s research has appeared in leading journals such as Nature Climate Change and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and his publications have received over 1400 citations. His work has received widespread national media attention and public engagement, including four stories in the New York Times since 2015.

Research Team

  • Jace Colby, Utah State University
  • Jennifer Boehnert, NSF NCAR RAL
  • Brend Hoppe, NSF NCAR RAL

Advisory Board

  • Ladd Keith, University of Arizona
  • Sara Meerow, Arizona State University
  • Paul Schramm, CDC
  • Jennifer Marlon, Yale University
  • Hunter Jones, NOAA’s NIHHIS
  • Maggie Allen, NOAA’s NIHHIS

Reports