Global surveys show people’s growing concern about climate change

1. Global polls on climate change
2. Climate change is an important issue for people across the globe
3. There is a growing concern about climate change and its impacts
4. Higher climate change-related risks lead to a higher level of threat perception
5. People call for climate action, but remain divided regarding international cooperation and responsibility
6. How do we tackle this issue?
7. Other insights – Business engagement and news consumption
8. Resources – surveys used

Several global surveys highlight that a significant majority of people consider climate change a serious concern. In the United Nations Development Program’s 2021 Peoples’ Climate Vote survey, which the organisation said was the largest public opinion survey on climate change ever conducted, nearly two-thirds (64%) of the 1.2 million respondents found that "climate change is a global emergency." The survey asked respondents in 50 countries, representing 56 percent of the world population.

The sentiments observed also resonated with other major surveys. The Open Society Foundation survey attempted to understand major issues impacting people across the globe. When asked to rank “the most important challenges facing the world“ in the survey’s second edition in 2023, the respondents identified ‘climate change‘ and ‘poverty/inequality‘ as the most important challenges. Over three-quarters of the respondents to the OECD’s 2022 survey, which explored international attitudes towards climate policies, agreed that “climate change is an important problem.“ The 20 surveyed countries in the OECD poll accounted for over 72 percent of global CO2 emissions.

The most recent climate-focused Edelman Trust Barometer survey in fourteen countries reveals that 93 percent of respondents believe that “climate change poses a serious and imminent threat to the planet”. Of those, half said they had come to this realisation over time, whereas 43 percent said they had always believed in the threat.

The global polls deliver a clear verdict that people across the globe consider climate change to be a serious concern, but how people perceive the imminence and urgency surrounding the climate crisis varies across countries. Multiple polls, including the Ipsos Global Trends mentioned above, indicate that a higher share of respondents from developing economies believe that climate change is a crisis that impacts them on a personal level.

Over 60 percent of people in developing economies, such as the Philippines, Colombia and Mexico, and only 20 percent of people in developed economies, such as Norway and the Netherlands, consider the personal impact of climate change imminent, the 2023 International Monetary Fund’s Public Perceptions of Climate Mitigation Policies survey showed.

The responses in the Open Society Foundation’s 2023 survey and Ipsos’s 2022 survey for the World Economic Forum also provide evidence to substantiate that correlation. In climate vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh (90%), Kenya (83%), Ethiopia (83%) and India (82%), more people are “anxious that climate change could have a negative impact on them and their livelihoods in the next year“ than in Germany (69%), the USA (56%) and China (54%). In the World Economic Forum’s Climate Change: severity of effects and expectations of displacement survey, a higher share of respondents in countries such as India (65%), Turkey (64%), Malaysia (49%) and Brazil (49%) believed that they or their families “will be displaced from home in the next 25 years.” In the 34 surveyed countries, a lower percentage of respondents – 25 percent in Germany, 23 percent in Poland, 17 percent in Sweden, 21 percent in Argentina and 21 percent in the Netherlands – believed that they were exposed to climate change-related displacement risks.

The 2023 Ipsos Earth Day poll asked respondents in 29 countries whether “their country is being asked to sacrifice too much to tackle climate change.” A significant share of respondents in both developed economies (an average of 30% in the 17 developed countries surveyed) and developing economies (an average of 38% in the 12 countries surveyed) share this sentiment.

On average, 70 percent of respondents in the 29 countries surveyed in the 2023 Ipsos Earth Day poll overwhelmingly agreed that the “developed countries should do more to combat climate change.” While support for the above statement was the lowest in developed economies, such as Canada (62%), the Netherlands (61%), the United States (58%) or Japan (58%), the majority of respondents in all the countries surveyed agreed to this statement.

The responses to the Open Society Foundation's survey question of whether “high-income countries should take the lead in reducing global greenhouse emissions” matched those of the Earth Day survey. With a global country average of 79 percent, respondents acknowledged the developed economies’ responsibilities. Support here was the lowest – 59 percent – in Germany.

While there is an overwhelming consensus that the industrialised economies should pay more and take the lead in fighting climate change, people still want all countries to contribute to these efforts. When asked “Which countries do you think should be paying to reduce carbon emissions?” in the International Monetary Fund’s Public Perceptions of Climate Mitigation Policies survey, more than 50 percent of respondents in all 28 countries surveyed chose “all countries.” The global average of countries in support of the “all countries” option stood at 64 percent against an average 20 percent for “only rich countries.” In the same survey, there was significantly higher support (47%) for the “countries paying to reduce carbon emissions based on their current emissions” option than for the “countries paying to reduce carbon emissions based on their past emissions” option (32%).

Edelman Trust Barometer

Since 2000, Edelman, a global public relations and marketing consultancy firm, has studied trust in four pillars of society: government, business, media and civil society. The Edelman Trust Barometer is one of the rare recurring surveys that already has more than 20 editions. In its  2016 edition, ‘climate change/global warming’ appeared for the first time as a societal issue. But at the time, it was not considered the most important issue in any of the 28 countries participating in the survey. Since 2020, climate change-related questions have regularly featured in the Edelman Trust Barometer, reflecting the growing importance of the issue. Since 2021, the Barometer also started conducting a yearly survey focused on climate change. The 2023 survey found a significant reduction in trust in  government, business, media and civil society “to do the right thing when it comes to climate change,” with media seeing the largest drop (-9pp).

The same survey reveals that people have the lowest level of trust in climate information coming from government leaders, CEOs, and journalists. Most respondents trust scientific experts, but the overall level of trust declined.

Surveys by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Since 2022, the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), which is part of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, is conducting yearly surveys to understand patterns in climate change news consumption across the world. The surveys focus on the same eight countries from four continents.

The 2023 survey finds that on average more than half (55%) of the respondents in each country accessed climate change news and information on a weekly basis. There is a noticeable variation among the surveyed countries: the share varies from less than half in India (44%) to almost two-thirds in Germany (65%). The share of people regularly accessing climate change news rose in every country in 2023 except in Pakistan.

The same survey highlights that on average, half of the people in the surveyed countries trust news media as a source of climate news. Compared to 2022, on average, there is only a slight reduction in trust in news media, but trust significantly dropped in Germany (-11 pp) and the UK (-6pp).

The survey found a widespread concern about general misinformation. On average, 82 percent of people expressed concern in each of the countries. A very similar picture emerges when it comes to climate information. On average, 27 percent of people in each surveyed country “think they saw false or misleading information” about it in the last week. In India, France, the UK and Germany, people said they observed more misinformation about climate change than about politics or government policies.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism conducts a yearly global survey to understand how digital news are being consumed across the world. In the 2023 YouGov survey across 46 countries for the institute, a significant share of news consumers said they were relying on various social media platforms to access news about climate change. Thirty-seven percent of Twitter and Instagram users, and 36, 35, 33 and 28 percent of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat users, respectively, said that they “pay close attention to climate change-related news” on these platforms.