There is widespread concern that climate change will pressure the stability of democracies. Theorists argue that as the consequences of climate change become more immediate, citizens might question the legitimacy of existing institutions to fulfill their basic responsibilities and might permit or even demand non-democratic decision-making. This paper tests this theoretical concern by investigating whether citizens perceive non-democratic decision-making as legitimate in addressing climate change, particularly in the face of climate threats. We conduct survey experiments in the Netherlands and Italy (N=6000), exposing respondents to a vignette with coastline flooding projections due to sea level rise in the EU and various decision-making scenarios, including representative, technocratic, and executive decision-making. Our findings reveal that citizens in both countries are highly supportive of expert governance on climate policy, even if they oppose more progressive climate measures. Additionally, we find that priming climate threat further boosts support for executive decision-making but not for technocracy. Importantly, the perceived legitimacy of technocratic and executive decision-making is uncoupled from citizens' perceptions of the democratic quality of the process. While citizens recognize that expert and executive decision-making is less democratic, they still consider particularly expert decision-making a fairer and more acceptable approach to climate policy decisions.