America's climate anxiety, mapped
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Climate anxiety is concentrated in big U.S. metros and some coastal communities, recent estimates find.
Why it matters: The findings paint a stark picture of how attitudes toward climate change vary nationwide.
Driving the news: About 63.3% of U.S. adults overall are "somewhat" or "very" worried about global warming as of 2024, per Yale Program on Climate Change Communication estimates based on survey data.
- Yet attitudes vary widely by location, with comparatively low shares of adults expressing such concerns in many counties.
- The findings are based on statistical modeling using data from nationally representative Ipsos surveys.
Zoom in: Some of the counties with especially high shares of adults worried about global warming — like Queens, New York (79.8%) — are coastal areas vulnerable to climate-driven threats like flooding.
- They also tend to be relatively populous, with 4 of the 10 most-worried counties having at least 1 million residents.
- Many major metro areas, like Columbus, Ohio, and Salt Lake City, Utah, also show up on the map above as pockets of relatively higher climate concern compared to surrounding areas.
What they're saying: While the map above may look like a sea of purple, "it's crucial to remind people that the vast majority of the population exists in some of these green places," says Jennifer Marlon, executive director of the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions and senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment.
Between the lines: Individual attitudes about climate change are not based entirely (or perhaps even primarily) on local risk, with politics, education, and other factors playing big roles.
- Many of the areas with relatively lower climate anxiety are vulnerable to various kinds of extreme weather that could be amplified by climate change, like hailstorms.
Go deeper: Yale's interactive page features an array of local climate opinion data, with questions ranging from whether global warming is happening at all to thoughts on drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
