Seventy-five percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, and 63% of the country is worried about the effects. But only 38% in the U.S. believe that climate change is caused mostly by human activities.
Those are three of the data points that are now accessible in a new online tool developed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication using responses to its International Public Opinion on Climate Change survey. The Global Factsheets tool, provides information about people’s climate change knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and behaviors in 187 countries and territories worldwide.
“Public opinion is a key determinant of policy change, especially in democracies. Yet, for people in many countries around the world, climate change is a relatively new idea and involves complex scientific concepts that are unfamiliar,” wrote Andrew Gillreath-Brown, Adán Rivas, Martial Jefferson, Jennifer Carman, Emily Goddard, Leah Ndumi Kioko, Eric Fine, Seth Rosenthal, Anthony Leiserowitz and Jennifer Marlon.
“As climate change becomes an increasingly salient issue globally – relevant to public health, economic prosperity, and national security – policy and decision makers, the media, educators, and others need to understand current public levels of climate change awareness and engagement,” they wrote in a post on the program’s website this week introducing the tool.
Other U.S. responses:
- Climate change will harm future generations a great deal: 52%
- Climate change will harm me personally a great deal: 23%
- Climate change is personally important: 44$
- Climate change should be a government priority: 58%
- Of the six climate change audience groups identified in the survey, 32% fell into the “alarmed” category, 23% were labeled “concerned” and 14% “cautious.”
The opinion data included in these fact sheets are based on a survey of 139,136 Facebook monthly active users, aged 18 and older, and the margin of error for individual countries and territories ranges from 2 to 5 percentage points. Interview dates of the survey were August 3 – September 3, 2023.
Some of the countries were grouped by geography to produce the results because they have smaller populations and/or numbers of Facebook users. Samples from these countries and territories were combined into “group” scores (i.e., Caribbean, Asian and Pacific Islands, and some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.)
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