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It is well established that human perceptions of risk depend on a multitude of factors, such as subconscious processes, heuristics and biases, conscious reasoning, and social influences (Norgaard 2011). Even risk scientists are affected to some degree by nonscientific drivers, such as “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” (i.e., uncertainty). Another aspect affecting scientific investigations of environmental risk is media focus, which can influence research (Burton 2017). Given the daily news about climate change, natural disasters, endangered species, and chemical exposures, it is useful to understand public perceptions of risk—which are influenced by both science and media releases.

METHODS

Environmental stressors

To determine scientific, media, and public interest in climate change and other environmental stressors, we established relationships between research articles and media coverage from August 2018 to August 2019, and, through Google Trends, we also explored the volume of internet searches for selected environmental topics over the last 15 yr. Initially, 50 environmental topics were selected using Google search and Scopus (Figure 1). The criteria for selecting keywords were as follows: 1) words or phrases representing related queries for climate change on Google search and Scopus; 2) words or phrases with sufficient search volume in Google Trends to facilitate the analysis; 3) overlap with previous studies (Archibald and Butt 2018; Petersen et al. 2019) looking at online interest in environmental topics; and 4) words or short phrases that are specific and not prone to confusion with other popular, nonconservation search keywords (e.g., mercury the element may be used to refer to a famous singer or a planet in the solar system, so it was excluded).

Issue Section:
Focus Article
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