Using Search Data to Measure Climate Change Perceptions

• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• EUI Climate Workshop
• STG Climate

Measuring public perceptions of climate change is key to designing effective climate policies. The existing literature has studied climate change perceptions using aggregate data, individual surveys, and media analysis.

While informative, these approaches face important limitations. Aggregate analyses may capture spurious correlations, survey responses often reflect stated rather than actual preferences, and media-based measures do not measure actual consumption behaviour. Chiara Binelli and her co-authors propose a novel methodology that addresses these challenges by using Google Trends data to capture individuals’ active information-seeking behaviour. Using principal component analysis, they construct four climate-relevant indices (Climate Change Awareness, Preparedness, Pro-Environmental Behaviour, and Policy Awareness) that measure search intensity for comprehensive and theory-based lists of selected keywords. Using data from 2004–2024 across four U.S. states with differing exposure to extreme climate and partisanship, they provide a novel, behaviour-based measure of climate preferences, and we assess how exposure and political context shape public engagement with climate change.

Chair:

• Jacopo Bencini, Research Associate, Florence School of Transnational Governance

Speaker:

• Chiara Binelli, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Bologna

Discussants

• Raffaele Ventura, Research Associate, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Alessia Casamassima, Research Associate, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

This session forms part of the EUI Climate Workshop, a forum that brings together members of the EUI community from all departments working on climate-related issues from across the institution. Find out more about the workshop and the upcoming sessions here.