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Stakeholder engagement is a vital, yet under-accessed and under-studied, resource for tackling wicked environmental problems. This paper examines mental models – cognitive representations of “real” systems – refined through group model building (GMB) with stakeholders concerned with environmental issues in the US state of Oklahoma. During GMB, a diverse group of high-level decision makers met with a variety of physical and social scientists to collaborate on mental models concerning three environmental focus areas in Oklahoma: encroachment of eastern red cedar, grid and infrastructure resilience, and marginal water use and re-use. We ask: how do individuals from diverse stakeholder groups describe causes and consequences of key environmental problems in Oklahoma? Results from this analysis advance efforts toward developing socially sustainable solutions for environmental problems in Oklahoma and beyond. 

Abstract Research has demonstrated that members of the public recognize anomalous weather patterns, and that subjective perceptions of the weather are related to beliefs about the occurrence of climate change. Yet despite two decades of scholarship and dozens of studies, inconsistent and insufficient data have made it difficult to credibly identify the causal impact of objective experiences on perceptions, and the impact of perceptions on beliefs regarding climate change occurrence. Here, we overcome these limitations by collecting and analyzing data from a 5-y panel survey of 2,500 individuals in Oklahoma, a US state that is highly divided on questions about climate change. Our findings indicate that the relationship between local weather anomalies and climate change beliefs is heavily dependent on baseline beliefs about whether climate change was occurring. For people who did not believe in climate change in the initial survey in our series, perceptions of anomalously hot and dry seasons shifted their beliefs towards the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change, whereas their perceptions of anomalously cool and wet seasons shifted their beliefs away from anthropogenic climate change. This relationship was not present among people who believed that climate change was occurring at the beginning of the study; their perceptions of seasonal temperature and precipitation anomalies had no effect on their beliefs about climate change. These patterns have substantial implications for the evolution of public beliefs about climate change.