Growing climate change risk concerns with rising regional disparities in China

This study presents a high-resolution mapping of climate change perceptions across China, highlighting the evolution of public perception regarding the priority and impact of climate change over a 13-year period between 2010 and 2023. Utilizing data from two national surveys conducted ( N = 11783 and N = 4050), we show a considerable rise in the perceived priority (19%) and impact (13%) of climate change issues nationally, alongside growing regional disparities. We do robustness checks of our results using repeated simulations between multilevel regression and poststratification and disaggregation methods. By examining perceived impacts against actual risk exposure, we show the need for managing regional vulnerabilities and tailored and targeted communication strategies to mitigate the spatial mismatch between climate change perception and risk exposure. ; © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . ; R.D. thanks Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [OPP1144], Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (CHRG) and ai@cam for the support. C.Z. is supported by Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Shuguang Project, 21SG22). ; The primary data for this study are derived from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010 ...