New research shows frontline communities and the general public share similar levels of concern about global warming but diverge sharply when it comes to its most immediate consequences: extreme heat, power outages, and other day-to-day harms.
Frontline communities worry about climate change as much as non-frontline communities but their fears look different. While both frontline and non-frontline respondents express similar overall concern about global warming, a new study from researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) at the Yale School of Environment, George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice finds that people living in frontline communities are significantly more concerned about its direct impacts reshaping their daily lives.
“Many people in the climate movement assume that people who are impacted by climate change are more worried about it, but that is not the case, including in frontline communities,” said Jennifer Carman, Director of Survey Strategy at YPCCC and the study’s lead author. “Instead, people in frontline communities are more worried about hazards that directly affect their day-to-day lives, like extreme heat and power outages — and these hazards are made worse by climate change.”
The study, published in One Earth, reveals that about 65% of both frontline and non-frontline respondents are worried about climate change, however frontline communities, which face the greatest exposure to climate impacts and often have the least capacity to recover from them, expressed heightened anxiety about specific threats that hit closest to home.
Researchers also found an information gap: People in frontline communities are less likely to hear about global warming from friends, family, or the media, and are less likely to be aware of the scientific consensus that it is happening. This disconnect, the authors say , underscores the need for climate communicators to shift away from broad, abstract framings of the problem and toward conversations rooted in community-specific impacts.
Geographic analysis adds another layer to the findings. Frontline communities most worried about global warming are concentrated in the Southwest and Texas, while those least worried tend to be in Appalachia and the Ozarks — a pattern the research team explores in an accompanying interactive ArcGIS StoryMap, which allows users to explore demographics, climate change worry, and frontline status data for each of the 3,143 counties in the 50 states of the United States and Washington D.C.
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“Frontline communities are not a monolith: They are politically, demographically, and geographically diverse, and there are many frontline communities — especially communities of color — that are already taking action to reduce the harms they face from climate change,” Carman said, pointing to groups like Mississippi Communities United for Prosperity in Duck Hill, MS, which trains local youth to build green infrastructure to protect their neighborhoods from flooding as an example.
Pointing to the study's finding that frontline residents are less likely to hear about climate change through their social networks, the authors’ recommendations for policymakers include engaging communities around specific harms that climate change worsens, highlighting how investment projects deliver direct local benefits, and increasing climate conversations within frontline communities themselves.
“The most important thing is to build genuine relationships with people who are already doing work in those communities,” Carman said.
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