We use cookies where necessary to allow us to understand how people interact with our website and content, so that we can continue to improve our service.
We only ever receive anonymous information, and cannot track you across other websites.
View our privacy policy
There isn’t much trust or pride in political leaders, but the public expects political leadership on climate change nonetheless.
Polls consistently show that the British public expects to see leadership from politicians on climate change, placing the responsibility for climate change at the feet of politicians over the private sector or individuals.
Our own Climate Barometer tracker data shows that voters and MPs agree that the UK should be one of the most ambitious countries in the world when it comes to addressing climate change, regardless of what other countries are doing. This has dropped by around 10% in 2023 for both the public and politicians, but support still comfortably outweighs opposition.
Wider polling suggests people tend to think that Britain is either doing about the same as, or more than, other countries on climate change – but a similar number say they don’t know. But few are persuaded by the argument that Britain is taking risks by ‘acting alone’.
In the run-up to COP26 – held in Glasgow and positioned as a demonstration of British climate leadership – there was a small but meaningful increase in optimism about climate change as the conference progressed. So although there is a tendency for MPs to underestimate the salience and breadth of support for climate action, visible and consistent leadership on climate can cascade positively back into public opinion.
In terms of being a persuasive argument for accelerating the net zero transition, though, invoking British leadership falls increasingly flat – likely reflecting wider dissatisfaction with the political establishment and the sense shared by many that things are headed in the ‘wrong direction’.
In our Climate Barometer tracker data (below), the argument that British climate leadership can be a source of national pride is generally unpersuasive: grand claims like this do not currently resonate with a general public that views climate (like so many issues) through an ‘anti-politics’ lens.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the public doesn’t want and expect political leadership on climate change, simply that politicians making strong claims to political leadership are not seen as credible in the context of politicians failing to keep their promises.
In fact, polling suggests that people feel ‘embarrassed’ by politicians who backtrack on green policies, and that the word most commonly selected by the public to describe politicians watering down net zero commitments is ‘untrustworthy’.
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.
A divisive COP30 ended last week with tripled funding for adaptation (though a delay on timeline), and roadmaps to end fossil fuels and deforestation being channelled to processes outside of the UN.
Despite the absence of the USA and China not wanting ‘to lead alone’, Climate Barometer data, featured in Business Green last week shows that the UK public continues to think that the UK should be one of the most ambitious countries in the world when it comes to addressing climate change, regardless of what other countries are doing (43%). 31% think that the UK should not take steps to address climate change until other bigger countries like the US and China agree to do the same.
And on the whole, MPs and the public still recognise that climate change is a shared global responsibility. 61% of UK MPs and 44% of the public say that when it comes to climate action, countries that individually account for less than 1% of global emissions, collectively have a broadly equal responsibility to big emitters like China.
There is a noticeable perception gap between Conservative MPs and their constituencies, where only 18% of MPs believe that (individually) ‘lower emitting’ countries have a (collective) responsibility equal to China, compared to 42% of their supporters. By contrast, Labour MPs and supporters largely agree on shared responsibility.
“The UK might ‘only’ account for under 1% of global emissions, but we are also less than 1% of the global population – that’s the kind of basic principle of fairness that most people can get behind”.
Adam Corner (quoted in Business Green).
Signal in the Noise: Climate opinion trends for 2025/26
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change