A newly released report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) confirms that education is key to addressing climate change
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| The innovative survey was distributed across mobile gaming networks
in order to include hard-to-reach audiences in traditional polling,
like youth under the age of 18. Photo: UNDP Bhutan |
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The Peoples' Climate Vote (PDF 27.9 MB) |
The largest ever opinion survey on climate change was carried out by UN CC:Learn partner UNDP in 2020 and showed that 64% of 1.2 million respondents think that climate change is a global emergency.
The survey entitled "People's Climate Vote" covered 50 countries, reflecting a bit more than half of the world's population, and its results were analyzed by the University of Oxford.
Over 500,000 respondents of the survey were under the age of 18 at the time of the poll, which made youth the biggest age group surveyed.
One of the survey's key findings has proven that education is paramount to ramp up climate action: the poll confirmed that there is a clear correlation between level of education and belief in climate change.
For instance, people who held university degrees or were attending university were way more likely to believe that climate change is a global emergency.
This spanned across all surveyed countries, from low-income to high-income ones, with 82% of people in Bhutan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 87% and 82% in France and Japan, respectively.
Something we saw very clearly was the high correlation between education and belief in the climate emergency. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to think that there is a climate emergency." Cassie Flynn - Strategic Adviser to the UNDP
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme Survey respondents were asked if climate change was a global emergency and whether they supported eighteen key climate policies across six action areas: economy, energy, transport, food & farms, nature and protecting people.
Results show that people often want broad climate policies beyond the current state of play.
For example, in eight of the ten survey countries with the highest emissions from the power sector, majorities backed more renewable energy.
In four out of the five countries with the highest emissions from land-use change and enough data on policy preferences, there was majority support for conserving forests and land.
Nine out of ten of the countries with the most urbanized populations backed more use of clean electric cars and buses, or bicycles.
The survey was distributed across mobile gaming networks in order to include hard-to-reach audiences in traditional polling, like youth under the age of 18.
Young people will bear the brunt of climate change. They are also more likely to act on it. UNDP has conducted the biggest ever opinion survey on climate change, with over 1.2 million respondents, mostly youth, and 64% of whom considered climate change an emergency.
Polling experts at the University of Oxford weighted the huge sample to make it representative of the age, gender, and education population profiles of the countries in the survey, resulting in small margins of error of +/- 2%.
Policies had wide-ranging support, with the most popular being conserving forests and land (54% public support), more solar, wind and renewable power (53%), adopting climate-friendly farming techniques (52%) and investing more in green businesses and jobs (50%).
The survey shows a direct link between a person’s level of education and their desire for climate action.
There was very high recognition of the climate emergency among those who had attended university or college in all countries, from lower-income countries such as Bhutan (82%) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (82%), to wealthy countries like France (87%) and Japan (82%).
When it comes to age, younger people (under 18) were more likely to say climate change is an emergency than older people.
Nevertheless, other age groups were not far behind, with 65% of those aged 18-35, 66% aged 36-59 and 58% of those over 60, illustrating how widely held this view has become.
Links
- (AU) Australians Fear Climate Change More Than Catching Covid, Survey Shows
- UN Global Climate Poll: ‘The People’s Voice Is Clear – They Want Action’
- (AU) Survey Shows Australian Support For Paris Agreement And Net Zero Target
- (AU) Climate Change Worrying More Australians Than Ever Before, Australia Institute Report
- A Million Young People Urge Governments To Prioritise Climate Crisis
- (AU) Australian Youth Feel Unprepared, Uneducated And Underappreciated On Climate Change: Report
- Italy To Become First Country To Make Learning About Climate Change Compulsory For School Students
- 8 Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom
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