This article was published by The Energy Mix on June 25, 2024.
By Christopher Bonasia
Nearly three-quarters of the people in fossil fuel-producing countries want their governments to speed the transition to clean energy, while a minority think big businesses are addressing climate change effectively, a poll of 73,000 people across 77 nations has found.
“There can be no doubt that citizens across the world are saying to their leaders, ‘you have to act and, above all, have to act faster’,” Achim Steiner, administrator for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told The Guardian.
“This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on.”
The People’s Climate Vote was conducted by UNDP and the University of Oxford. The survey used randomly-generated phone numbers to contact respondents, often on mobile phones. Detailed demographic information was collected and results were weighted to reflect the balance of age, gender, and education in each country. Global, regional, and G20 estimates and cross-country averages were also population-weighted, thus “the results are strongly influenced by larger countries such as India, China, Russia, and the United States,” the UNDP-Oxford report says.
Overall, 72 per cent of respondents said they wanted their country to transition quickly from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. The majority supported a quick transition away from fossil fuels in 85 per cent of the countries surveyed, including most of the world’s 10 biggest fossil fuel-producing countries, except Russia and Iraq.
Countries were grouped into seven regions for some of the analysis: Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Western and Northern Europe. The least supportive of a quick transition away from fossil fuels were countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region and the Northern America region, which included Canada and the United States. Countries showing the lowest support in those two regions were Russia (16 per cent) and the United States (53 per cent).
Globally, not only are most people supportive of transitioning from fossil fuels, but most also reported feeling increasingly worried about climate change in the past year. Some 53 per cent of respondents said they are now more worried about climate change, with higher proportions in least developed countries than in the world’s richest nations. Countries where people reported the greatest increase in concern were Fiji, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Türkiye.
Saudi Arabia, where people showed the least increase in worry compared to any other country, was also where people were most positive about their country’s efforts to address climate change.
Globally, 49 per cent of people thought their country was responding well to the climate crisis, while 25 per cent thought their country was responding badly. Women were generally less satisfied with their countries’ efforts than men.
Respondents overall are unconvinced by the climate efforts of big businesses, though there was great variation between countries. Only 39 per cent of people globally reported that businesses were addressing climate change well, but between countries that percentage ranged from 9 per cent in Greece to 57 per cent in China and Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, 43 per cent globally said government is the actor with the most impact in addressing climate change, compared to 14 per cent who said big businesses had more impact, 13 per cent who credited the UN, and only 12 per cent who chose campaigners and activists.
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