Energy and the Environment
Climate change poses multiple societal challenges. Public policies designed to tackle these challenges must maximize both resilience in the face of increasing natural disasters and mitigation to limit the effects of climate change. The IPPRA energy and environment portfolio encompasses several domains, ranging from the overall energy mix, specific energy sources like nuclear energy and hydropower, emerging technologies like fusion energy, to environmental hazards like wildfires, PFAS, and wildfire smoke.
Our research focuses on helping policymakers, federal agencies, and national laboratories design better policies, more effective risk communication strategies, and ultimately make better decisions about the country’s energy portfolio. We build and maintain several datasets and tool to help us track and understand the evolution of the policy process as well as public support for and perceptions about a variety of energy and environmental issues.
Some of our core projects include the Energy and Environment (EE) Survey Series, which is a national survey that IPPRA has designed and maintained since 2006. The survey contains core questions about public views on climate change, overall energy preferences, as well as nuclear energy and related technologies more specifically. Collected annually, data from the EE survey series has been routinely used by policymakers and national labs to inform their program priorities and communication strategies.
