Research Focus

In my view, climate change is humanity’s most serious public health threat. My research focuses on public understanding of and engagement in climate change–including but not limited to its health implications–and on developing and evaluating methods of enhancing public understanding and engagement.

Current Projects

■ Our Climate Change in the American Mind surveys–conducted twice annually–investigate public understanding of climate change.

■ Our highly successful Climate Matters project supports TV weathercasters–and as of summer 2018, other local journalists–as local climate change reporters; on-air climate reporting by weathercasters has increased 16-fold since the start of the project in 2013.

■ Our Program on Climate and Health investigates public understanding of the health relevance of air pollution and climate change, and has formed a consortium of 22 medical societies that are now collaborating with us, and with one another, in educating the public about this issue.

Select Publications

■ J. Kotcher et al., How Americans respond to information about global warming’s health impacts: evidence from a national survey experiment. GeoHealth 2(9), 262-275 (2018).

■ J. Hathaway et al., Health implications of climate change: a review of the literature about the perceptions of the public and health professionals. Current Environmental Health Reports 1, 197-204 (2018).

■ S. Van der Linden et al., Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change. Global Challenges 1(2), 1600008 (2017).

■ E. Maibach et al., TV meteorologists as local climate educators. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (2016).