People Want Climate Action, But Why Are They Ignored?

A new study has found that 69% of people from 125 countries would pay their governments to help stop climate change

- Bibek Bhattacharya

What do people really think about climate change? This is a question that is becoming increasingly important as governments keep trying to do the bare minimum—or nothing at all—to stop the planet from heating up to catastrophic levels. As far-right political movements in the US and EU have taken up cudgels against the vital shift to renewable energy sources, governments are seemingly looking for a populist vote on what they should do about the crisis. Never mind the science, or the real devastation that is being caused by global warming.

So what do ordinary people really think, and how different is that from what governments believe that people think? According to a study published in the science journal Nature in August, this discrepancy is huge, by a whopping 32 percentage points.

The study's authors had surveyed the 2024 attendees of the United Nations Environment Assembly (Unep) to gauge the perception of policy officials gathered there about public opinion on climate action. They asked 191 attendees from 53 countries one question: how many common people would donate 1% of their personal income towards climate and environmental action? The Unep attendees believed that only 37% of people would do so.

The researchers benchmarked this response against a separate survey from 2024, which had asked this same question to 130,000 people across 125 countries: How many of them would donate 1% of their income towards climate action? 69% of them had said they would do so.