Temperature highs, climate change salience, and Eco-anxiety: early evidence from the 2022 United Kingdom heatwave
Alexandru Savu
Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 1, 87-94
Abstract:
Extreme weather episodes may increase the salience of climate change and worsen people’s well-being. Empirically studying these effects is however challenging, given limited data availability around difficult-to-predict such events. Addressing this issue, I use Google Trends information to assess how climate change salience and people’s wellness were affected by an unprecedented mid-July 2022 heatwave in the United Kingdom, when temperatures exceeded 40C for the first time in the country’s history. I document a significant rise in the search-intensity for ‘climate change’, as well as for ‘worry’ as a marker of psychological distress at the time of the heatwave. In contrast, I show that similar patterns did not emerge in 2019, when comparably high temperatures were recorded, but when the 40C-threshold was not exceeded. Taken together, my results suggest that the effects of the 2022 heatwave are partially driven by a climate anxiety mechanism, wherein extreme weather episodes constitute negative signals for climate change progression. I conclude by discussing several limitations of my study that future work may tackle.
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2023.2257026 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:32:y:2025:i:1:p:87-94
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20
DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2257026
Access Statistics for this article
Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips
More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().