ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Climate change and societal responses to it pose an increasing problem for contemporary societies. Traditional social research covers a broad range of topics, including how people perceive climate-related risks, how they adapt to them, who can adapt, and how climate change shapes political attitudes and mobilization. While important insights have come from this kind of survey-only research, the very nature of climate change points to the need to draw on new data sources and link them to survey data.
Data sources such as geospatial data, remote sensing products, sensor readings, administrative records, and digital traces are becoming central to research as a whole. For climate change and society, their importance is even more pronounced. Climate change acts as an external shock, yet it is the product of burning fossil fuels and hence of economic activities as well as social practices. We need data on the exposure to climate change as well as on the traces of social behavior. Examples include data on car use, protest, urban structure, housing, climate impacts, and natural catastrophes linked to climate change. However, their integration raises a range of challenges concerning the quality and comparability of different sources, the alignment of data collected at different spatial and temporal scales, and the accessibility of such data to researchers without compromising respondent confidentiality. At the same time, these data allow us to study substantive questions that were previously out of reach.
We therefore welcome both:
- methodological contributions dealing with environmental data sources, their error properties, their limitations, and their analytical potential,
- substantive contributions that apply such data to societal responses to climate change
This session aims to provide a forum for exchange between methodological and substantive perspectives on new data sources in climate change research.