MainClimate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (defined as an event that is rare at a particular place and time of year1), which puts a substantial proportion of the global population at physical and economic risk1. The cost of extreme weather events attributable to climate change is estimated at US$143 billion per year2. The impacts of extreme weather events are disproportionately felt in countries in the Global South3. Even though the Global South is at greater risk, attribution studies and social science research on human responses to such events overwhelmingly focus on countries and populations in the Global North4,5,6.Mitigative action is needed to slow climate change and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events. So far, global efforts have been insufficient, which calls for more stringent climate policies. Public support for climate policies is important because such support can drive governmental policy outputs7 and policymakers often respond to public demand for climate policies8.The psychological distance of climate change (that is, the perception that climate change is spatially, temporally and socially distant) may help explain societal inaction on this issue9. If so, public awareness and understanding of climate change may increase as more people experience extreme weather events for themselves10,11,12,13,14,15. However, previous studies on the relationship between experiencing extreme weather events and climate change action and beliefs have produced inconsistent findings. In particular, some studies have found that experiencing extreme weather events increases climate change belief16, concern11,17,18,19, support for climate policies and green parties17,20,21,22,23, and climate change adaptation24, while other studies found no relationship6,25,26,27. Studies using aggregate objective measures of exposure to and impacts of extreme weather events often find no effect of extreme weather experience on climate change attitudes25,26,28. For example, one US study found that living in an area with higher fatalities from extreme weather events was associated with perceiving more climate risks29, while another US study found that fatalities from extreme weather events were not associated with opinions about climate change30. However, these studies used different definitions and measurements of extreme weather events, and these extreme weather events were compared with different psychological and behavioural outcomes27. Further, most studies have focused on a single country31 or a single type of extreme weather event (for example, heatwaves), which limits the comparability of the impacts of different types of extreme weather event. This limitation is considerable, as a meta-analysis found notable differences in effect sizes depending on the type of extreme weather event32.The inconsistency of previous studies might also be explained by another important factor: whether people attribute the extreme weather event to climate change6,11,31,33,34,35. Recent studies support this hypothesis: people who attribute extreme weather events to climate change are more likely to perceive climate change as a risk and to report engaging in mitigation behaviour36,37. For example, a study in the United Kingdom found that the subjective attribution of floods to climate change is a necessary condition for the experience of floods to translate into climate change threat perception36. However, no cross-country evidence exists on the subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change.Current studyWe combined natural and social science approaches to examine how extreme weather events and their attribution to climate change relate to support for widely discussed climate change mitigation policies across 68 countries (N = 71,922). This study employed an interdisciplinary design by triangulating data on exposed populations computed using the probabilistic CLIMADA risk modelling platform38,39 with global survey data on subjective attribution of extreme weather events and support for climate policies collected in the Trust in Science and Science-related Populism (TISP) study40. We used a standardized metric to comparatively assess the relationship between the size of exposed populations to several extreme weather events—river floods, heatwaves, European winter storms, tropical cyclones, wildfires, heavy precipitation and droughts—and climate policy support. Specifically, we modelled how many people in a country were exposed to extreme weather events over the past few decades relative to the total population. We referred to this as the ‘exposed population’ (see Online Methods).Our preregistered study addressed the following research questions: (1) Does exposure to extreme weather events on the population level relate to climate policy support? (2) Do subjective attribution and exposed population have an interactive effect on policy support? In addition, we addressed the following non-preregistered questions: (1) What is the level of public support for five climate policies across countries? (2) To what degree do people attribute extreme weather events to climate change across countries (subjective attribution) and is subjective attribution related to policy support?We hypothesized that people who live in countries with higher exposure would show stronger support for mitigative climate policies, and that the relationship between exposed population and policy support would be stronger for individuals with higher subjective attribution. We also hypothesized that the relationship between exposed population and policy support is associated with people’s income and residence area (urban vs rural), which might relate to their adaptation potential to extreme events. Note that not all preregistered questions are addressed in this paper.Support for climate policiesWe assessed support for the following five climate policies with a 3-point scale (1 = not at all, 2 = moderately, 3 = very much): Increasing taxes on carbon-intense foods, raising taxes on fossil fuels, expanding infrastructure for public transportation, increasing the use of sustainable energy, and protecting forested and land areas. In line with previous research, increasing carbon taxes received the lowest support41,42, with only 22% and 29% of people, respectively, indicating they very much support increased taxes on carbon-intensive foods and fossil fuels (Fig. 1a). Protecting forested and land areas, by contrast, was a popular policy option, with 82% supporting it very much and only 3% not supporting it at all. The second most-supported policy was increasing the use of sustainable energy, with 75% supporting it very much, and only 5% not supporting it at all. For further analyses, we combined responses to the five policy options into an index (α = 0.61; see factor analysis in Supplementary Table 12 and non-preregistered analyses with policy subscales in Supplementary Fig. 7).Fig. 1: Global evidence of the support for climate policies.a, Weighted response probabilities for single items measuring support for climate policies. b, Mean support for climate policies in 66 countries (climate policy support was not measured in Argentina and Malaysia). Participants were asked: “Please indicate your level of support for the following policies.” Response option ‘not applicable’ is not shown. No data were available for countries shaded in light grey.Full size imageA clear majority supported climate policies in all countries (global mean (M) = 2.37, s.d. = 0.43 on a scale from 1 = Not at all, 2 = Moderately and 3 = Very much). These findings are in line with a previous study showing that 89% of participants demand intensified political action on climate change43. We calculated mean support by averaging participants’ support for five policies (see Online Methods and Fig. 1). This mean value is representative in terms of gender, age and education due to post-stratification weighting (see Online Methods). We found strong differences in support across countries and policies (Fig. 1b). Support for climate policies was particularly high in African and Asian countries, average in Australia, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, and below the global average in several European countries, such as Czechia, Finland and Norway (Supplementary Figs. 1–6). Non-preregistered analyses comparing our aggregate measure with policy support subscales (that is, support for taxes, support for green transition) can be found in Supplementary Fig. 7. Our results for the aggregate measure and policy subscales were mostly consistent.Participants who identified as men, were younger, more religious, had higher education, higher income, left-leaning politics and who lived in urban areas were more likely to support climate policies (Supplementary Tables 1–7 and Fig. 8), in line with previous studies44,45.Subjective attributionParticipants indicated subjective attribution by rating the degree to which they believed that climate change has increased the impact of six extreme weather events—droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, heavy rain, floods, heavy storms—in their country over the past decades (1 = Not at all, 5 = Very much). Responses to the six items were mean averaged (α = 0.92). Globally, subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change was well above the scale midpoint in all countries (M = 3.80, s.d. = 1.02). In line with a previous study36, non-preregistered analyses showed that subjective attribution was positively related to identifying as a woman, being older, more religious, having higher education and higher income, living in an urban (vs rural) area and self-identifying as politically liberal and left-leaning (Supplementary Table 8).There was little variation in subjective attribution across extreme event types. Subjective attribution appeared relatively lower for wildfires (M = 3.67, s.d. = 1.28) and higher for heatwaves (M = 3.94, s.d. = 1.16). However, subjective attribution varied across global regions (Fig. 2). Participants in South American countries most strongly agreed that the occurrence of extreme weather events has been affected by climate change over the past decades, especially in Brazil and Colombia (Supplementary Fig. 9). Subjective attribution was lowest in Northern European and African countries (Supplementary Fig. 9). Lower subjective attribution in African countries could be explained by the fact that climate change awareness and belief in human-caused climate change are still relatively low across African countries46.Fig. 2: Subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change (mean index) over the past decades.Data from 67 countries. Subjective attribution was not assessed in Albania. No data were available for countries shaded in light grey.Full size imageExposed population and policy supportThe size of the exposed population varied by the type of extreme event (Fig. 3). While almost all the sampled populations were exposed to heatwaves and heavy precipitation over the past decades at least once, fewer populations had been exposed to droughts, wildfires and floods. Our fully anonymous data did not allow geospatially matching participants to certain areas where extreme events occurred; we therefore do not know whether participants were personally exposed to those events and cannot test whether exposure at the individual level relates to policy support. However, we can reliably estimate whether exposure at the population level relates to policy support.Fig. 3: Exposed population across countries over the past few decades.Exposed population refers to the average annual proportion of a country’s total population exposed to a specific weather-related hazard and averaged over the past few decades. The exact time frame varies slightly across events. Exposed population is modelled for the 68 countries included in the survey. a, Exposed population to droughts. b, Exposed population to European winter storms. c, Exposed population to heatwaves. d, Exposed population to heavy precipitation. e, Exposed population to river floods. f, Exposed population to tropical cyclones. g, Exposed population to wildfires. No data were available for countries shaded in light grey.Full size imageWe investigated whether exposure at the country level and subjective attribution of extreme events at the individual level were associated with stronger climate policy support. Since we were interested in studying how the relationships vary between different types of extreme weather event and policy support, we ran seven blockwise multilevel regression models—one for each type of extreme weather event—predicting an index of climate policy support. Because participants were clustered within countries, our models included random intercepts across countries. Step 1 of the blockwise regression included socio-demographic variables and exposed population. In Step 2, we added subjective attribution for the specific event and three interaction terms: exposed population × subjective attribution, exposed population × income and exposed population × residence area.Belief that climate change has impacted local extreme weather events predicted support for climate policy (Fig. 4). Random effects models show that the relationship between subjective attribution and policy support was significantly stronger in North America, Australia and in several European countries than the mean global effect, and significantly weaker in Peru and South Africa (Supplementary Figs. 10–16).Fig. 4: Weighted blockwise multilevel models predicting climate policy support.Summary of seven multilevel models, one for each type of extreme weather event, with random intercepts across countries predicting climate policy support and controlling for socio-demographic variables and two additional interaction terms. Models include data from 65 countries. Error bars denote 95% confidence intervals. Circles denote standardized estimates. Filled circles denote significant effects at P