Leaders take heed: your constituents are worried about climate change

Over the coming decade, global climate action will continue to depend on national political conditions. The primacy of national politics for international climate policymaking was the central concession of the Paris Agreement. The imminent US exit from the Paris Agreement under the second Trump presidency will only deepen this reality. If we want to solve the climate crisis, we will need to build coalitions of powerful climate advocates in as many countries as possible. 

Of course, many factors are critical in shaping the domestic politics of climate change around the world – from the institutions that structure policy decision-making to the distribution of economic interests and their relationship to fossil fuels. But among these is a need to understand the attitudes, concerns and needs of publics about the climate threat. And this understanding must be tailored to the national level, since that is where we should expect energy for policy action or inaction over the coming years.

A need for data

A decentralised politics of climate change therefore requires high-quality data at national scales. This national data can shine a light on the national incentives to prioritise climate mitigation and adaptation policies. This is where the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll continues to prove itself invaluable. Once again, the 2023 World Risk Poll dataset provides us with the most comprehensive global snapshot of public climate concern, simultaneously measuring public attitudes in 142 countries around the world.

The results remind us, once again, just how widespread global concern about climate change is, with almost three-quarters of the global public (72%) feeling at least somewhat threatened by climate change over the coming 20 years.

Intriguingly, the fraction of respondents who don’t feel able to say whether climate change is a threat to people in their country fell from 19% in 2021 to 12% in 2023, a significant decline that suggests global knowledge about the issue may have increased. Even so, uncertainty about whether climate change will harm people is distributed unevenly across the world. The Poll data sheds light on persistent lack of knowledge in several nations that are critical global players, most prominently Indonesia, where 38% don’t know enough to say if climate change will threaten them.

Regional and national sub-plots

Global top-lines mask rich and fascinating information at regional and national scales. As before, the strongest levels of perceived threat remain in Europe and some East Asian countries (particularly Japan and South Korea). Conversely, publics in some oil-rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa are more sceptical that climate change threatens their countries (though only in Saudia Arabia does this position approach a majority).

In this World Risk Poll dataset, the finding that a sizeable fraction of the Indian population (25%) rejecting the idea that climate change will threaten their country over the coming two decades stands out. This is markedly higher than other recent survey work, and suggests the need for additional research. For example, recent surveys of climate attitudes by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that 92% of the Indian public was very or somewhat worried about climate change in 2023.1 I suspect that these differences may reflect persistent low knowledge about climate change in parts of India, and highlight ways in which lack of climate knowledge and scepticism of climate impacts can be parsed differently across different survey question wordings.

This 2023 snapshot in time is, of course, important. But trends matter as much, if not more so. Despite the World Risk Poll’s use of an identical set of survey questions across each country, there are always reasons to expect that local contexts and experiences will shape how national publics interpret a given survey item. Comparing the 2023 data with previous years, within-country trends reinforce just how stable concern about climate change remains globally.

One intriguing exception might be China, where the Poll charts a dramatic increase in concern about climate impacts, jumping from 54% in 2021 to 78% in 2023. This increase may reflect, in part, shifts in survey modes (World Risk Poll data is collected as part of the Gallup World Poll, for which Chinese samples since 2019 have seen changes from face-to-face, to telephone, to web-based surveys). However, if this finding persists in future survey work, it could herald a major shift in climate concern in the world’s largest carbon polluter.

The bottom line

Overall, the climate concern measures in the latest World Risk Poll report continue to describe a planet of people who understand that their homes are in peril. Publics around the world remain deeply worried about the impact of climate change in their country, on short and medium time scales. National and international leaders who heed these results must grapple with the fact that climate threats are no longer something that only future generations will care about. In country after country, national leaders should be aware that their current constituents are already deeply alarmed.

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  Leiserowitz, A., Thaker, J., Verner, M., Goddard, E., Carman, J., Rosenthal, S., Modala, N., Talwar, M., Deshmukh, Y., Shukla, G., Marlon, J., Ballew, M., & Goldberg, M. (2024). Climate Change in the Indian Mind, 2023. Yale University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.