Public engagement with health and climate change around the world: a Google Trends analysis

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of the importance of people engaging with the health dimensions of climate change, we know surprisingly little about the levels of public engagement around the world. We address this knowledge gap by examining Google Trends data, using people's online information-seeking behaviour to shed light on global engagement with health and climate change between 2014 and 2023. We observe that over the past decade—and particularly since 2020—there has been growing public engagement via Google searches with health and climate change around the world. The increasing engagement with the intersection of health and climate change is largely distinct from engagement with either climate change or health separately. We observe that such engagement is highest in low-income and middle-income countries. There is also greater engagement with health and climate change than with other issues that intersect climate change—eg, the economy and security—highlighting the public salience of health framings of climate change.