Surviving a natural disaster actually has almost zero impact on your long-term happiness or how much you care about climate change.
arXiv · March 16, 2026 · 2603.12883
The Takeaway
Common wisdom suggests that major disasters act as a 'wake-up call' for climate action. However, an analysis of 2 million people across 93 countries found that disasters are 'psychologically near-irrelevant' to the average citizen's worldview.
From the abstract
Scientists agree about the urgency of the problem of climate change. Most citizens, however, pay little attention to gradually increasing temperature levels. Growing numbers of natural disasters in the world might then play a fundamental role as the key signal to alert humanity to the severity of the problem of the changing climate. But is that potential mechanism working? In this empirical examination (N>2 million over three decades in 93 countries), we show for the first time that a typical pe