When Sarah Broadwater first started a rose garden across the street from her East Baltimore home, more than 30 years ago, she hoped it would lend the oft-littered neighborhood some charm.

The 89-year-old Milton-Montford resident still tends that garden, but today she also appreciates the measure of resilience it brings against the rising heat of climate change.

“I think we need to try to control it,” Broadwater said of the warming climate. “We’re not going to stop it, but we need to try to control it.”

Broadwater is among a broad majority of Baltimore-area residents who say they’re worried about how climate change could harm their lives, according to a new survey by Johns Hopkins University researchers. Overall, 73% of residents who answered the survey in the city and Baltimore County expressed concern that climate change will harm them personally.

But the survey, released Thursday, also found that Black residents like Broadwater are far more likely to feel climate anxiety than their white neighbors. Around 80% of Black respondents said they are at least somewhat concerned about personal harms from the changing climate, compared with 67% of white residents.

Broadwater still worries about other environmental issues in East Baltimore, like litter and high rates of childhood asthma, but she’s also worried about how the climate is changing globally. All you have to do is see the buds on the trees to understand spring is coming too early these days, she said.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ 21st Century Cities Initiative believe their findings represent the first assessment of how Baltimore-area residents think about climate change. Surveyors interviewed 1,352 residents, mostly in the city but also in Baltimore County, in 2023. The survey has a 4.2% margin of error.

Often, wealthy white people are front and center in movements for climate and environmental sustainability, said Mac McComas, project manager for the Baltimore Social Environmental Collaborative at Johns Hopkins, giving the impression that this demographic cares most about climate change.

“This masks the reality on the ground,” said McComas, a lead researcher on the survey.

To understand these sentiments, The Banner interviewed both survey respondents and others.

Kelly Cross, president of the Old Goucher Community Association, has led work to make his central Baltimore neighborhood more resilient to climate change, building flood mitigation projects for heavier rains and planting trees to cool the area in summer heat.

Cross, who is Black, said he thinks many Black Baltimoreans tend to be less focused on “abstract” conversations or policy debates about climate change, but are cognizant of how warming trends could impact them. Many Baltimore households are more vulnerable than their suburban counterparts to intense heat pockets and flooding, an issue that contributes to sewage backups in the city.

Black people are familiar with how this tends to go, Cross said.

“If there’s something bad happening in the world,” he said, ”we’re probably about to get it worse than other people.”

Perhaps unsurprising in liberal Baltimore, the Hopkins survey found residents tend to be more concerned about the impacts of climate change than the average American or average Marylander. Similar national polling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that just 46% of Americans and half of Marylanders worry about the effect global warming will have on them personally.

McComas said researchers were surprised by a difference in how lower-income and wealthier people in Baltimore think about climate change.

For white Baltimore-area residents, the survey found that worries about the harms of climate change ease as their income rises. The opposite was true for Black respondents: In this demographic, concerns about climate change increased with income.

Of all the groups surveyed, Black respondents with incomes over $110,000 a year expressed the most anxiety about climate change, at 91%, compared with 62% of such white households.

White and Black households in the area with incomes less than $30,000 expressed similar levels of concern about climate harms.

Cross, who makes over $110,000 a year, said that even in relatively higher-income groups, many Black residents have deep roots in Baltimore. A family may have a beloved church or own their grandmother’s old house. These ties may be weaker for affluent white households, Cross speculated, making it easier for them to leave if life here gets uncomfortable.

Diana Pike, a Northeast Baltimore resident who responded to the Hopkins survey, is worried for her children’s futures in a hotter world. She said climate change’s dangers feel scarier today than the nuclear war drills she did as a kid.

Pike and her husband, whose household income exceeds $110,000 a year, want to install solar panels on their carriage house. But Pike, who is white, doesn’t think many of her peers share her concern.

“I feel like I’m an anomaly, honestly,” she said. “Most of the people that I work with are more concerned about their beach body or their second home.”

Brian Ault, a retired Baltimore County resident who also took the survey, often thinks about the dangers of climate change. He and his wife try do their part by regulating energy use in their Arbutus home, but he wishes they could afford more substantial steps, like going solar or buying an electric car.

“That’s the kind of tension I think that most people have,” he said. “You do the best you can in smaller, less expensive ways.”

The divergence between how higher-income Black and white residents think about climate harms is difficult to parse, McComas said, but he argued that the survey findings show the importance of investing in local measures to adapt to climate change.

To Councilwoman Phylicia Porter, the findings are catching up with sentiments expressed by residents in her South Baltimore district for a long time.

Lower-income Baltimore residents might not talk about climate change in the same language as scientists, but when Porter hears residents vent, “Man, it’s hot outside” or “It’s hotter than last summer,” they’re expressing anxiety about climate change.

Porter’s district includes neighborhoods like Brooklyn and Curtis Bay, in an industrialized area that has become a battleground over pollution and environmental justice issues.

This movement got Jeffrey Barnes, a retired IT worker for the U.S. Census Bureau, thinking more about environmental injustices.

A Baltimore native, Barnes moved back to his hometown in the late 2000s and purchased a home in Brooklyn. Just a few years later, his neighbors began fighting plans to build a huge trash incinerator nearby.

Today, Barnes, 69, is a member of the group Progressive Maryland and sometimes testifies on legislation impacting South Baltimore pollution. The same facilities that release toxins into the air near his neighborhood also drive climate change, he said.

Whether this hotter future will make life harder for him in Brooklyn, Barnes said, is hard to say.

But why gamble, he asked.

“We’re tipping up to the edge, and we don’t really know where the edge is.”