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People of colour in the UK are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts. But despite this, there remains a lack of research around diversity, experience and engagement with climate change.
Its well established that the UK climate sector is very unrepresentative in terms of ethnic diversity – but climate opinion data is too often under-representative too.
Only around 1 in 20 people working in environmental charities identify as a person of colour, and campaigns often fail to reach diverse audiences.
At the same time, many ‘nationally representative’ survey samples either don’t contain high enough numbers of appropriate quotas for people of colour, or do not report them. When they do, the numbers tend to be too low to make meaningful comparisons. The voices and perspectives of people of colour should be central to the UK climate discourse, but too often they are not, whether through a lack of representation in opinion data, or a lack of representation in the climate sector itself.
People of colour in the UK are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, but there is a paucity of research around their experience of and engagement with climate change. The Spotlight report, published by a team led by Dr Charles Ogunbode at the University of Nottingham in 2023, was astonishingly the first dedicated exploration of the views and perspectives of British people of colour on climate change through a large-scale survey.
In a collaboration with Dr Ogunbode and the centre for Climate Change & Social Transformations (CAST), Climate Barometer re-analysed some of the Spotlight data, along with recent data from the annual CAST ‘climate views’ survey, in order to provide some preliminary findings around ethnicity and engagement with climate change.
These initial analysis suggests that people of colour in the UK are likely to have experienced a range of climate impacts personally, see climate change as a serious, urgent threat, and express high levels of support for ambitious climate policies. However, the current evidence base is very limited and sample sizes don’t allow for robust comparisons to be made between different minority ethnic and racial groups. So there’s a real need for more insights to better guide campaigns and strategies – something that forms the central call of the report.
Survey samples which are representative of ethnicity matter on their own terms. But improving diversity in climate engagement (and the climate movement) requires more attention to ethnicity in opinion research. Researchers, research funders, insights commissioners and campaigners have the power to make a positive impact by:
Commentary & Analysis
11th March 2026
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
What does climate ‘salience’ mean in 2026?