Heat, Power, and Resistance: How Climate Change Threatens Support for Gender and Environmental Equality?

Climate change is not only an ecological crisis but also a profound source of social and political stress that reshapes public attitudes toward justice, hierarchy, and social change. While a growing body of literature has examined how climate risks influence environmental concern, far less is known about how embodied climate stress affects attitudes toward broader equality agendas. This study addresses this gap by proposing a framework of dual risk perception under climate stress, distinguishing between existential risk perception and cultural–identity risk perception. Drawing on risk perception theory, political psychology, and environmental politics, we argue that physical climate discomfort—particularly heat stress—can generate two divergent political responses. On the one hand, heightened temperatures activate existential risk perception rooted in bodily vulnerability and survival instincts, leading to increased support for environmental protection across social groups. On the other hand, when climate stress becomes symbolically associated with moral or structural demands—such as feminism or gender equality—it can trigger cultural–identity risk perception, provoking defensive reactions among socially dominant groups who perceive these claims as threats to established hierarchies. We empirically test this framework using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) between 2002 and 2020, combined with high-resolution meteorological data from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). To capture embodied climate stress, we construct a Human-Perceived Temperature (HPT) index based on heat index and wind chill measures, which more accurately reflects lived thermal discomfort than ambient temperature alone. Employing hierarchical models that account for spatial and temporal variation across U.S. states, we examine how heat anomalies shape attitudes toward environmental protection and feminist values. Our findings reveal a striking divergence. Increased heat stress is consistently associated with stronger support for environmental protection, suggesting that climate discomfort functions as a generalized ecological alarm. However, the same heat stress is linked to declining support for feminist values, particularly among socially advantaged groups such as higher-income and White respondents. These results indicate that climate change simultaneously mobilizes survival-based environmental concern while amplifying cultural backlash against equality-oriented agendas. By conceptualizing climate change as a dual threat multiplier, this study contributes to debates in environmental politics and political sociology on how risk, identity, and inequality intersect. It challenges assumptions that climate stress uniformly strengthens support for progressive social change and highlights the need to account for identity-based resistance in climate governance and justice-oriented policymaking.