Mapping Racial and Ethnic Variation in Climate Belief Networks

Abstract

Past research observing differences in environmental attitudes across racial and ethnic groups often mischaracterized those differences as deficits, casting environmental concern as a predominately White issue. Our study contributes to current work correcting this account by mapping substantive differences in the structure of climate attitudes across racial and ethnic groups. We use belief network analysis on 14 years of survey data from the Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM) survey ( n = 20,396), and we find substantive differences in the climate belief networks of White, Black, and Hispanic survey respondents. These differences are not primarily about the strength or weakness of associations between attitudes, as theorized by deficit accounts. Instead, we find different attitudes are most central to these respective belief networks. We argue research on the social construction of race and ethnicity can better measure substantive variation in climate attitudes among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) respondents by attending to how racialized experiences with climate change may produce aggregated belief networks with different profiles of salient issues and different interpretive frameworks.