Thea Gregersen

Perceptions of Climate Change Across Europe
 

The project’s objectives are to generate integrated knowledge about people´s perceptions of climate change across Europe. One important aspect of public perceptions is mental models–simplified mental representations of a phenomenon. Mental models of climate change comprise, for example, general knowledge about the climate system and beliefs about climate impacts (Böhm & Pfister, 2001; Moser, 2010). The research question is addressed by analyzing data from two cross-national datasets: the European Perceptions of Climate Change (EPCC) and the European Social Survey (ESS). Both datasets contain comparable questions from representative samples of four and twenty-three European countries, respectively, and constitute an invaluable resource for studying mental models about climate change, within and across countries.