Mapping climate change awareness through spatial hierarchical clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geographically-informed hierarchical clustering method to identify and analyze groups of countries with similar levels of climate change awareness, considering socio-economic, climate-related, and spatial data.

Contribution

It proposes a novel clustering approach that integrates geographic information to produce more stable and interpretable country groupings based on climate awareness levels.

Findings

Geographically-informed clustering yields more stable partitions.

Identifies clear regional differences in climate awareness levels.

Western countries show high and consistent awareness, while others vary more.

Abstract

Climate change is a critical issue that will be in the political agenda for the next decades. While it is important for this topic to be discussed at higher levels, it is also of paramount importance that the populations became aware of the problem. As different countries may face more or less severe repercussions, it is also useful to understand the degree of awareness of specific populations. In this paper, we present a geographically-informed hierarchical clustering analysis aimed at identify groups of countries with a similar level of climate change awareness. We employ a Ward-like clustering algorithm that combines information pertaining climate change awareness, socio-economic factors, climate-related characteristics of different countries, and the physical distances between countries. To choose suitable values for the clustering hyperparameters, we propose a customized algorithm that takes into account the within-clusters homogeneity, the between-clusters separation and that explicitly compares the geographically-informed and non-geographical partitioning. The results show that the geographically-informed clustering provides more stability of the partitions and leads to interpretable and geographically-compact aggregations compared to a clustering in which the geographical component is absent. In particular, we identify a clear contrast among Western countries, characterized by high and compact awareness, and Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries having greater variability but still lower awareness.