Updated Digests of Polls on Climate Change

Publics Around the World Call for Greater Efforts to Address Climate Change

As representatives of most countries of the world meet in Durban, South Africa to try to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, newly updated digests of American and international public opinion reveal that publics around the world and in the United States say their government should give global warming a higher priority and strongly support multilateral action to address it.

These digests have been developed by the Council on Foreign Relations' International Institutions and Global Governance program and the Program on International Policy Attitudes. They provide comprehensive analyses of international and US polls on the world's most pressing challenges -- and the institutions designed to address them. The digest of international polling on the global environment can be found here and the digest of US polling here.

Prior to the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, publics worldwide gave robust majority support to the proposal that their government should agree to limit their country's greenhouse emissions as part of an international agreement. A WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO) poll for the World Bank found majorities in all sixteen countries polled saying that at the conference their country should "be willing to commit to limiting its greenhouse gas emissions as part of such an agreement"--on average 87%, including 82% of Americans.

WPO also asked about how much their government is doing to deal with the problem of climate change (2009). A majority in 13 of the 16 countries said their government is not doing enough, with three countries divided. In the average of all countries polled, 63 percent said their countries were not doing enough. The Chinese were higher than the global average, with 77% saying their government is not doing enough, while Americans were below the global average with 58% taking this position. Only very small minorities in all countries said their government is doing too much. Steven Kull, director of PIPA commented, "There seems to substantial support for action."

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