The New Climate Divide project, financed by the DFG Emmy Noether Programme, asks how climate change is transforming from a broadly consensual issue into a polarising political divide that reshapes mobilisation, participation, and political identities in Europe. It theorises climate politics as a distributive conflict in which competing coalitions mobilise relative winners and losers through different problem definitions, policy visions, and reform trajectories, especially under conditions of overlapping economic and geopolitical crises. Empirically, the project investigates these dynamics across electoral and civil-society arenas in seven European countries between 2010 and 2030.

In three inter-related work packages, ClimateDivide examines how actors mobilise around climate change, how citizens engage in response, and how in-group and out-group identities emerge around the climate divide.