Extreme weather as a window: Exploring the seek and supply of climate change information during meteorological disasters in China

Public engagement is essential for China to address climate change; however, few studies have explored how to encourage climate awareness among Chinese residents. The objective of this study is to explore the role of local extreme weather in advancing Chinese people’s climate change awareness. Whether local extreme weather functions as an opportunity to trigger the public’s interest in climate change across China and whether the local online information environment resonances with extreme weather by providing climate change news feeds have been examined by a combination of city-level meteorological warnings and search engine data. The results have verified that residents from 50 of the 360 cities show increasing concern for climate change when an extreme weather event occurs locally; however, only the online information environment of two cities echoes local extreme weather by providing more information about climate change or global warming. Correlations between extreme weather events such as heavy rain, an extreme weather event that has occurred in China, and climate change are underestimated. The effect of extreme cold events and snowfall on climate change awareness should also be noted more in China. This study suggests there is still a lot of room for improvement regarding both increasing and satisfying the public’s pre-existing climate change-related concerns. A promising approach would be adopting climate change prevention and adaptation as a news report framework for extreme weather events.