Public Climate Change Concern Dataset for 296 Cities in China (2011–2023)

Climate change has attracted growing attention in China, and public awareness and attitudes provide important input for the formulation and implementation of related policies. Developing a Climate Change Public Concern Index (CPCI) helps reveal key features of public environmental awareness and supports national climate governance efforts.This dataset uses 296 prefecture-level cities in China as the basic unit of analysis. It selects 17 keywords and uses the Baidu Index to measure public concern to climate change. An indicator system is constructed across four dimensions: climate change facts, causes, impacts, and actions. After cleaning and standardizing the raw data, a Gaussian mixture model is applied to weight the keywords. Sub-index scores are calculated and normalized, and the final CPCI at the prefecture-level city scale for 2011–2023 is obtained by taking the average of the four sub-indices.The dataset includes: (1) CPCI data for 2011–2023; (2) four sub-index datasets for 2011–2023. The data are stored in .xlsx format at the prefecture-level city scale, comprising one file with a size of approximately 643 KB.