We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article, “Vulnerability outpaces climate worry in U.S. frontline communities” in the journal One Earth.

Climate change affects everyone, but not equally. Communities facing the most exposure to climate impacts are often called frontline communities. These communities are often said to be hit “first and worst” by climate change impacts, since they face greater risk of both experiencing climate impacts (such as extreme heat and floods) and facing neglect during recovery from those impacts. Moreover, these climate risks exacerbate existing environmental hazards such as pollution from nearby industrial facilities, lack of green spaces, and neglected infrastructure – all of which have been linked to historical patterns of class and racial discrimination in the U.S. As a result, frontline communities are disproportionately lower-income and/or Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Indigenous.

However, although these communities are at greater risk from climate change, it does not necessarily follow that they are more worried about it. In this study, we integrated six waves of public opinion data (n = 6,183) from the Climate Change in the American Mind study with geographic data from the U.S. Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which designated specific neighborhoods (Census tracts) as disproportionately burdened by environmental and climate risks. These communities also qualified for priority federal funding through the U.S. Justice40 initiative, a program that designated 40% of federal funding for mitigation and adaptation solutions to communities disproportionately harmed by climate change, although this program ended in 2025. About 33.7% of people in the U.S. live in these tracts (using 2022 population estimates).

Results

We find that, at the national level, frontline communities and non-frontline communities are equally worried about global warming: About two-thirds of people in both frontline (65%) and non-frontline communities (65%) are worried about it. However, frontline communities are more worried about specific climate change impacts like extreme heat (52%) and power outages (48%) compared with non-frontline communities (42% and 36%, respectively).

One possible reason frontline communities are more worried than non-frontline communities about some of the impacts of climate change, but not about climate change itself, is that communication about climate risks may be happening less often in frontline communities than in non-frontline communities. For example, frontline and non-frontline communities are equally likely to say they have experienced global warming, but fewer people in frontline communities hear about global warming in the media (47% hear about it at least once per month). People in frontline communities are also much less likely to know that most scientists agree that global warming is happening (47%).

However, frontline communities are not a monolith, so we also conducted a geographic analysis to look at differences between them by merging summarized county-level data from CEJST with the Yale Climate Opinion Maps. We found the relationship between frontline community status and worry about global warming varies significantly by geographic location: For example, counties in the Southwest (particularly New Mexico and the Texas-Mexico border region) have high percentages of frontline communities and high levels of worry about global warming, while counties in the Appalachian and Ozark regions have high percentages of frontline communities but low levels of worry.

Geographic differences are explored in much more detail in a new interactive ArcGIS StoryMap, which allows users to explore detailed demographics, climate change worry, and frontline status data for each of the 3,143 counties in the 50 states of the United States and Washington D.C. We also provide case studies exploring counties with large percentages of the population in frontline communities, illustrating the variety of climate change impacts faced in these communities and the actions they are taking to protect community members from those impacts.

Key Takeaways

Although federal funding initiatives such as Justice40 are no longer in place, frontline communities still exist, and many state, local, and philanthropic efforts can still support them, including through strategic communication efforts. Specifically, we and our partners recommend the following:

• Community engagement efforts should discuss specific impacts of climate change and emphasize how climate change worsens these impacts in these communities. We do not suggest that increasing worry about global warming should itself be the end goal of future engagement efforts in frontline communities, as over-emphasizing negative aspects of climate change can be disempowering, particularly in communities with fewer resources to address them. Instead, connecting the dots between impacts (especially heat and power outages) and climate change may be a way to build engagement in climate solutions. Personal stories of climate change experiences, including its health impacts, may be especially effective.
• Strategic communication in frontline communities should also highlight how investment projects benefit the people who live there. Funders of climate solutions in frontline communities should not assume that people in these communities will immediately recognize the benefits of those investments – particularly if those benefits are described in terms of general climate benefits and not in terms of the community concerns that matter most to them.
• Strategic communications should aim to increase conversations about climate change among people who live in frontline communities. This may include engaging trusted communicators in frontline communities, such as community groups and community organizations, to start conversations about climate.

These findings align with the experiences of many people who work regularly with and in frontline communities. Thus, it is important to heed the views of people and practitioners in frontline communities not only in decision-making but in the science that informs it.

The full article is available here to those with a subscription to One Earth. If you would like to request a copy of the published paper, please send an email to climatechange@yale.edu with the subject line: Request frontline climate attitudes paper. Or, a free preprint version is available here. The ArcGIS StoryMap accompanying this article is available here.