Barcelona residents’ concerns of heatwaves, air pollution, and noise: Examining the link between environmental exposures and risk perception

Environmental stressors pose significant threats to human well-being, especially in urban areas. While extensive research—particularly in the United States—has documented higher exposures in socially vulnerable neighborhoods, studies that examine and compare residents’ perceptions of multiple environmental risks, while also accounting for actual exposure levels and neighborhood characteristics, remain relatively more limited. Our study addresses this gap by examining perceptions of residential outdoor environmental quality, integrating objective data on built and social environments with multiple measures of pollution, heat stress, and noise, alongside an original spatially referenced survey of Barcelona residents. Consistent with previous research, our results reveal distinct levels of concern among the three environmental risks, with heat stress evoking the highest level of concern. Only the concern about noise aligns significantly with measured exposure at the census tract level. By contrast, air pollution and heat stress risk perceptions are more strongly shaped by political ideology, environmental concern, and place attachment. Respondents living in wealthier neighborhoods report higher concern about heat waves, regardless of their actual levels of exposure to heat stress. The evidence suggests that perceptions of urban environmental risks are socially and spatially patterned, and not always proportional to actual exposure.