A new study shows most people believe climate change is happening and impacting their daily lives.
(Bloomberg) — Most people are perfectly aware that climate change is affecting their home country and community right now, according to a new study that debunks long-held beliefs on the public’s perception of global warming.
For years, campaigners raising awareness on climate change wrongly focused on showing it’s not a distant phenomenon because they assumed that’s what people believe, according to a scientific paper published on One Earth on Friday. Researchers from the University of Groningen reviewed 27 opinion polls over the past five years gathering the opinion of hundreds of thousands of people across the planet.
They found most people perceive the consequences of climate change as close in terms of physical distance and timescales and see it impacting their local areas. Two different Gallup polls in 2019 and 2021 found 41% of over 100,000 respondents in 121 countries and territories think climate change is a very serious threat to their home country.
The findings were published amid growing efforts by governments, businesses and individuals to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that human activities cause. The planet has already warmed 1.1C on average since pre-industrial times and scientists warn an increase of more than 1.5C or 2C will lead to catastrophic consequences.
Researchers led by Anne van Valkengoed of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that having the wrong assumption about the public’s perception of climate change may have led policymakers to design ineffective communication campaigns.
People can simultaneously feel climate change as something happening in their backyards and in distant latitudes, opinion polls show. Evidence suggests people are actually more strongly motivated to engage in climate action when they perceive the threat as distant, the study found. These public perceptions were found to be true even in countries that have had climate-skeptic governments, like the US and Australia.
To spur action, researchers suggested that policymakers and the media should change their messaging to reflect the evidence that people perceive the impacts of global warming as close, are concerned by it and willing to change their behavior, including supporting climate change policies.
“If they believe many others do not care, people may themselves also start to care less about climate change and start to act less pro-environmentally out of a desire to fit in,” researchers wrote in the report. “An (incorrect) belief that others are not engaging in climate action may lead people to believe that their own actions will be futile, reducing their perceived collective efficacy and demotivating them to act.”
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