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Taking action may be crucial in shaping how we think and feel about climate change, according to this open access research paper. By carrying out climate actions people may ‘self-persuade’ – building up a sense of confidence, or ‘agency’, to carry out further climate actions. As Kris De Meyer and colleagues write:
“our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowing how to act.
Due to this persuasion-through-action effect, storytelling can play a key role, as we can pick up this confidence to act from other people too:
“One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing a wide variety of stories of people taking positive action on climate change.”
New polling by More in Common shows that 86% of the UK public believe climate change to be either entirely or partially responsible for the June 2026 heatwave. This holds true even for those opposing net zero, with 63% of them seeing climate change as at least in part to blame for the extreme heat.
At the same time, more than 4 in 5 think the UK is unprepared to cope with extremely hot weather (84%) and more than 3 in 4 see the country as ill-equipped to deal with water shortages and drought (77%).
Asked about which groups they think are most negatively affected by extreme heat, the elderly (88%) and children (68%) were seen as worst impacted, closely followed by “ordinary people” (66%).
Describing the most recent heatwave in their own words, responses revealed a public struggling to cope, with words like “hot”, “worried”, “unbearable” and “uncomfortable” being mentioned most often:
Relatedly, the majority expect more political leadership on the issue: 59% of the public say they want the government to help people like them cope with the impacts of extreme heat, compared to 26% who think the government should do the same amount and only 5% who say the government should do less to help people like them cope.
Climate change didn’t cause the culture wars, but culture wars are making climate change harder to solve.
In new research from Kings College London (KCL), divisions over climate change are seen as worse than divisions over Brexit, with the public more likely to say there is tension between climate change sceptics and believers (64%) than between Leavers and Remainers (52%), or between younger and older generations (45%).
This is despite the broad-based consensus on the importance of the issue that Climate Barometer data evidences, and which is seen consistently in wider research (e.g. the recent Britain Talks Climate & Nature report, which highlights widespread care for nature, wildlife and the benefits that the transition to clean, renewable energy can bring).
More new research (from Hope Not Hate) diving into the differences between people who intend to vote Reform highlights climate change as one of the dividing lines among a disjointed coalition of factions. ‘Squeezed Stewards’ (in an echo of More in Common’s ‘Rooted Patriots’ segment, who have high levels of threat perception around environmental risks) care about nature and acknowledge the climate crisis. But the ‘Hardline Conservatives’ subgroup of Reform backers are much more likely to be in the minority of people who reject action on climate change entirely.
What does climate ‘salience’ mean in 2026?