Awareness Is Uneven: What Shapes Public Recognition of Climate Justice and Equity in Central Texas

• In Event: Student Research: Public Attitudes, Communication, and Policy Acceptance

Abstract

While climate change is a global phenomenon, its burdens fall disproportionately on socially vulnerable groups—including communities of color and low-income—who possess fewer resources for adaptation and recovery. Yet, despite extensive academic and policy discourse on climate justice, public understanding of these systemic inequities remains limited. Research examining how the public understands climate justice is essential for identifying perception gaps, strengthening communication strategies, and building support for justice-centered climate action. This study examines public perceptions of climate justice and equity across four key dimensions: broad climate change effect, environmental health risks, flood exposure, and green space access through investigating differences among demographic and political affiliation groups and identifying key predictors of climate justice awareness. By focusing on Central Texas as a case using a 2023–2024 regional community survey (n=1,081), this research finds that respondents readily recognize disparities in specific, exposure-related issues, such as flood vulnerability across racial groups and green space distribution across income levels. However, they tend to view more generalized, abstract climate justice concepts—broad climate impacts and environmental health threats—as equally distributed across communities. The Ordinal Logistic Regression analysis shows the fundamentally dynamic nature of climate justice perception: each dimension of climate equity is shaped by its own distinct set of lived hazard experiences, climate-specific attitudes, social contexts, and ideological orientations with effects varying across demographic contexts, suggesting that climate justice is not a monolithic concept but a multidimensional construct requiring dimension-specific explanatory frameworks. The findings underscore that targeted, tangible, local experienced-based outreach and communication strategies are more likely to succeed in building broad public support for climate justice-centered policies, particularly in reaching those whose heightened concern about specific risks has not yet translated into recognition of broader systemic inequities. Positioned among the early empirical contributions to climate justice perception research, this study advances both scholarly understanding and practical policy action. Theoretically, it disaggregates climate justice perception across multiple dimensions and demographic groups, speaking to scholarship on climate justice communication, psychological distance, risk perception, and environmental justice coalition-building.  Practically, the findings translate directly into actionable guidance for municipal planners and policymakers, equipping them with the community-level evidence needed to design more targeted, localized engagement strategies for building the broad public support that equity-centered climate policies demand.

As state governments assume greater and more varied responsibilities for climate policy, understanding how public perceptions of climate justice vary across communities within and across states becomes increasingly essential. This study of Central Texas offers a replicable, community-level framework for capturing the variation and informing more responsive, needs-based state climate policies, laying the groundwork for a broader comparative research agenda. Systematically applying this framework across states with varying political ideologies, sociodemographic compositions, hazard vulnerabilities, and climate policy contexts would generate the cross-state evidence base needed to understand how the different contexts shape public awareness of climate equity, and where the most critical gaps in climate justice communication and engagement remain.

Author

• Yuer Wang, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author