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, we are assessing how populations perceive heat risks and engage in response behaviors and situating these against how policy and decision makers understand their constituents’ perceptions and behaviors. By doing so, we are aiming to 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. In this research, we 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. We 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.

This project contributes to broader efforts to build resilience to extreme heat by local and regional governments. 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. 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. Two workshops and one symposium, planned for 2025, will gather researchers and stakeholders to synergize learning and ideas across research projects on human and geographic dimensions of extreme heat.

Funding: National Science Foundation, HEGS Award # 2314912

Research Team

Advisory Board

• Ladd Keith, University of Arizona
• Sara Meerow, Arizona State University
• Paul Schramm, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Jennifer Marlon, Yale University
• Hunter Jones, NOAA’s National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS)
• Maggie Allen, NOAA’s National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS)