Extreme Weather, Public Concern, and Adaptation Policy: Evidence from Citizen–Government Interactions in China

We provide the first systematic high-frequency evidence on the intensity and dynamics of public hazard concern around extreme weather exposure. Using over 200,000 citizen messages posted to China’s Message Board for Leaders between 2011 and 2023, we construct monthly, prefecture-level measures of hazard concern and link them to exposure to temperature extremes, heavy precipitation, haze, and drought. Temperature extremes and heavy precipitation generate pronounced but short-lived spikes in hazard concern, with effects fading within one to two months. This indicates a narrow window for targeted communication to most effectively support attribution and belief updating. Notably, concern responses are heterogeneous across regions, are amplified in cities with more active government engagement in communication with citizens, and exhibit spillovers to indirectly exposed locations following particularly severe, nationally salient extreme events. We further show that heightened concern expression predicts increases in local policy attention in subsequent government work reports for hydrological hazards, but not for temperature extremes or haze.