The geography of responses to heat risk: linking decision maker and public perceptions

极端高温继续对全球数百万人的健康和福祉产生负面影响。人们和政策制定者对高温风险的看法可能会影响他们对极端高温的保护反应。在这个项目中，研究人员将评估人口如何感知热风险和参与反应行为，并将这些与政策和决策者如何理解其选民的看法和行为进行比较。通过这样做，调查人员将弥合极端高温风险和热防护行为反应选项如何被公众感知以及决策者如何感知和管理之间的差距。该项目有助于地方和地区政府更广泛地努力建立对极端高温的抵御能力。该项目产生的新知识有可能改善热治理，通知热警告和风险沟通，并设计更有效的公共卫生干预措施。该项目包括研究，以帮助那些最容易受到高温和其他类型天气灾害的人，以及负责减少这些系统性脆弱性的决策者。该项目有助于地理学和行为科学及其在风险背景下的交叉的理论和方法的进步。通过收集和缩小代表性调查数据，以确定热响应的地理变化，结合决策者调查，以更好地了解他们对选民的看法和信念，调查人员将检查不同级别的热治理的风险认知和热响应。该项目将把新兴的量化技术与政策和决策者调查相结合，对国家到地方范围的代表性社会调查数据进行空间分析和建模。调查人员利用具有代表性的调查数据和小面积估计的优势，使用多级回归和后分层来产生国家，州和地方对热风险的公众认知和反应的估计。这种方法提供了一个基线，从中可以了解负责热治理的决策者和政策制定者如何理解他们自己的选民的看法和反应，并将其纳入热规划和响应工作。两个研讨会和一个专题讨论会聚集了研究人员和利益相关者，以协同学习和极端高温的人类和地理方面的研究项目的想法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

Extreme heat continues to negatively affect the health and wellbeing of millions of people globally. The way people and policy-makers perceive heat risks is likely to influence their protective responses to extreme heat. In this project, the investigators will assess how populations perceive heat risks and engage in response behaviors and will situate these against how policy and decision makers understand their constituents’ perceptions and behaviors. By doing so, the investigators will bridge the gap between how extreme heat risk and heat-protective behavioral response options are being perceived by the public and how they are perceived and managed by decision makers. This project contributes to broader efforts to build resilience to extreme heat by local and regional governments. New knowledge generated in this project has the potential to improve heat governance, inform heat warnings and risk communication, and design more effective public health interventions. The project includes research to help those who are most vulnerable to heat and other types of weather hazards as well as the decision and policy makers responsible for reducing these systemic vulnerabilities. This project contributes to theoretical and methodological advances in geography and behavioral sciences and their intersection in a risk context. By collecting and downscaling representative survey data to determine geographic variations in heat response combined with decision-maker surveys to better understand their perceptions and beliefs about their constituents, the investigators will examine risk perceptions and responses to heat across different levels of heat governance. This project will integrate emerging quantitative techniques for spatial analysis and modeling of representative social survey data from national to local scales with surveys of policy and decision-makers. The investigators leverage the strengths of representative survey data and small-area estimation using multilevel regression and poststratification to produce national, state, and local estimates of public perceptions and responses to heat risk. This approach provides a baseline from which to understand how decision- and policy-makers responsible for heat governance understand their own constituents’ perceptions and responses and incorporate them into heat planning and response efforts. Two workshops and one symposium gather researchers and stakeholders to synergize learning and ideas across research projects on human and geographic dimensions of extreme heat.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.