Climate Attitudes & Communication

Building public support for ambitious climate policy requires understanding what shapes people’s attitudes toward climate change and how they respond to different ways of communicating the issue. My research in this area examines the effectiveness of framing strategies — whether reframing climate policy around co-benefits like jobs or health can increase support — and finds that the evidence is more nuanced than commonly assumed. This work also investigates the measurement of climate scepticism, showing that social desirability bias leads surveys to underestimate its prevalence, and examines how economic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic can erode environmental concern. A systematic meta-analysis of over 120 framing experiments reveals important methodological challenges in the literature, including publication bias and omitted interaction effects.

Labor market risk shapes individuals’ environmental attitudes and policy preferences

Ecological Economics (2026)

Systematic mapping of climate and environmental framing experiments and re-analysis with computational methods points to omitted interaction bias

PLOS Climate (2024)

Policy conflict between political elites shapes mass environmental beliefs

Electoral Studies (2023)

COVID-19 led to a decline in climate and environmental concern, evidence from UK panel data

Climatic Change (2022)

Current surveys may underestimate climate change skepticism evidence from list experiments in Germany and the USA

PLOS One (2021)

Assessing the relative importance of psychological and demographic factors for predicting climate and environmental attitudes

Climatic Change (2018)

Unilateral or Reciprocal Climate Policy? Experimental Evidence from China

Politics and Governance (2016)

Simple reframing unlikely to boost public support for climate policy

Nature Climate Change (2016)