Hope & Fear

Government climate opinion tracker data shows that concern about climate change remains very high in the UK in 2023:

• The majority of people (81%) said they were at least fairly concerned about climate change in summer 2023, with no significant change in overall levels of concern since Winter 2022 and Spring 2023 (82%). In Summer 2023, 40% said they were very concerned and 4% said they were not at all concerned.
• There has been a slow but steady decline in overall concern since Autumn 2021, and a steady increase in the proportion of people saying they were not very or not at all concerned – but the overall trend is continuing high concern.

There were also some important differences between segments of the population:

•  Concern about climate change was higher for women (85%, compared with 78% of men)
• Concern was higher for people educated to degree level (88%, compared with 82% of those with other qualifications and 70% of people with no qualifications).
• The proportion of those ‘very concerned’ about climate change was higher among those aged over 65 (46%) and lower among those aged 16 to 24 (34%) and those aged 35 to 44 (33%).

Polling by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has found that three in four adults (74%) reported feeling ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ worried about climate change – similar to the percentage who said they felt worried (75%) the year before, in 2021.

Just 1 in 10 people (9%) felt ‘unworried’ (somewhat unworried or not at all worried) about climate change, and around one in five (17%) said they were neither worried nor unworried.

The most frequently reported reason among those who were unworried or neither worried nor unworried about climate change was feeling that ‘there are more urgent priorities to be worried about’ (55%, up from 34% the prior year).

In a survey of 10,000 children and young people (aged 16–25 years) across ten countries around the world (including the UK) found that:

• Children and young people in all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried).
• More than 50% reported each of the feeling the following emotions in relation to climate change: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.
• More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.
• Many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet).
• Respondents rated governmental responses to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance.

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.”