Experience Exceeds Awareness of Anthropogenic Climate Change in Greenland

Abstract Greenland’s residents and Ice Sheet are both exposed to pronounced Arctic warming. Although Greenland is a hub for climate science, the climate perceptions of Greenland’s predominantly Indigenous population remained unstudied through the past decade of multi-national climate opinion polls. Conducting two original nationally representative surveys, here we show that Greenlanders are more likely than residents of top oil-producing Arctic countries to perceive that climate change is happening, and about twice as likely to have personally experienced its effects. However, half are unaware that climate change is human-caused, and those who are most affected appear to be least aware. An Inuit cultural dimension, indicated by the intertwined social ecological factors of Indigenous identity, subsistence occupation, village community scale and no post-elementary education, proves to be the main positive predictor of climate change experience but also the strongest negative predictor of awareness of human-caused climate change. Despite Greenland’s centrality to climate research, we uncover a widespread gap between the scientific consensus and coastal Kalaallit views of climate change, particularly among the country’s youth, fishers, and hunters. This science-society gulf has immediate and prospective implications for local climate adaptation, climate science communication and knowledge exchange between generations, institutions, and communities.