Climate Change Is the Biggest Threat, but Only a Few Are Willing to Change Lifestyles. Why?

 According to an international survey, climate change has scared citizens, yet most think they are already doing more to protect the environment than anyone else, even their government, and very few are willing to make big lifestyle adjustments.

Citizens have conflicting feelings about how their societies have dealt with climate change, and many are skeptical of international initiatives to avert a worldwide environmental disaster. The study, conducted in the spring before the summer season, brought additional wildfires, droughts, floods, and stronger-than-usual storms showing a growing sense of personal vulnerability from climate change amongst those polled. In Germany, for example, the number of people who are "extremely concerned" about the personal consequences of global warming has risen 19 percent since 2015. (from 18 percent to 37 percent).

Young adults

In many public polled, young individuals, who have been at the vanguard of some of the most visible weather data demonstrations, are more concerned about the personal consequences of a warming globe than their older counterparts. In Sweden, where 65 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are at least very concerned about the personal implications of climate change in their lifetime, contrasted to only 25 percent of those 65 and older, the age gap is the biggest. New Zealand, England, the United States, France, and Canada have significant age gaps.

People are concerned about how climate change may affect them over their lifetimes

Many people in 17 advanced economies are worried that climate change would negatively affect them directly at some point throughout their lives. A 72 percent express some fear that climate change would hurt them personally in their lifetimes, compared to 19 percent and 11 percent who say they are not too or just not concerned, respectively. The percentage of highly concerned that climate change would hurt them personally varies between 15% in Sweden to 57% in Greece. Climate change is feared by almost two-thirds of Canadians & six-in-ten Americans in their lives. Only 12% of Canadians or 17% of Americans are concerned about the effect of global climate change on their daily lives.

European citizens are concerned about the possible harm of climate change to varying degrees. More than three-quarters of people in Greece, Portugal, Italy, France, and Germany believe climate change will hurt them at some time in their life. Only in Sweden does a minority of adults show concern about the effects of climate change on them. Furthermore, 56% of Swedes seem unconcerned about the human consequences of climate change.

In general, people in Asia-Pacific are more concerned about weather API brings them personal harm than they are not. In Australia, 64% of people are concerned, while in South Korea, 88% are concerned. In South Korea, Singapore, and Australia, about a third or more people are afraid that climate change would hurt them directly.

In nearly all countries where trend weather data is available, the share of people who are highly concerned that climate change will hurt them personally at some time during their lives has climbed significantly since 2015. In Germany, for example, the percentage of people who are very concerned has risen by 19 percentage points in the last six years. The UK (+18 points), Japan (+16), South Korea (+13), and Spain (+10) all have double-digit changes. Japan is the only country where public worry about climate change has fallen significantly since 2015. (-8 points).

While many people are concerned that climate change may harm them directly in the future, the consensus is that climate change already impacts the environment around them. In Pew Research Center polls conducted in 2019 or 2020, 70% of respondents across 20 publics indicated climate change is having a significant or moderate impact on where they live. Majorities in the majority of the countries polled in a 26-nation survey conducted in 2018 believed global climate change posed a substantial threat to their own country.

Those on the left of the ideological divide are more likely than those on the right concerned about how global climate change may affect them personally over their lifetime. This tendency can be found in all 14 countries where ideology is measured. However, in ten of these 14, majorities on the left, center, and right are afraid that climate change will affect them personally.

The disparity is most pronounced in the United States, where liberals are 59 percent more likely than conservatism to be concerned about this prospect (87 percent vs. 28 percent, respectively). However, there are significant ideological differences in Australia (liberals are 41 points more likely than conservatives to agree on this), the Netherlands (+35), Canada (+30), Sweden (+30), and New Zealand (+23).

In several polled public, women are more anxious than men that changing climate will hurt them. Women in Germany are 13 percentage points more likely than men concerned about climate change harming them (82 percent vs. 69 percent, respectively). Several public, such as the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and the Netherlands, have double-digit variances.

Why Aren't People More Concerned About Climate Change?

People are frequently driven by a strong desire to avoid danger. If you're strolling down a dark, deserted city street, you're on the lookout for unusual sights and sounds, and you're speeding up to get back to a crowded place as soon as possible. When you step into the road and see a bus approaching, you step back. You stay inside if a large strange dog is howling outside your front door.

Why is it so difficult to encourage people to tackle climate change if they are motivated to prevent hazards to their survival?

Unfortunately, several issues make it difficult for people to become motivated about climate change. First, addressing climate change requires people to make a trade-off between short- and long-term benefits, which is the most difficult trade-off to make. Decades of research on temporal discounting have revealed that we overvalue short-term rewards compared to long-term benefits. People who do not set aside sufficient money in retirement prefer to spend it now rather than in their later years. Despite the difficulties that obesity can pose in the future, people overeat now.

Individuals and organizations both gain from denying climate change in the near run. Individuals who ignore their carbon footprint's impact on the globe are not required to adjust to the automobiles they drive, the items they buy, or the dwellings they live in. If companies don't have to invent new procedures to reduce carbon emissions, they can keep production costs low. Governments could save money now by relying on combustion-based power generation methods instead of developing and improving green energy sources, even if they are more cost-effective in the long run.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a nonlinear issue. People are quite skilled at judging linear trends. If you spend $5 per day on coffee, it's simple to calculate the impact on your weekly budget without using a spreadsheet.

People extrapolate functions linearly; therefore, it poses complications when a function rises slowly and accelerates. A few cigarettes are unlikely to kill you. Instead, the cumulative harm caused by years of smoking causes serious health problems. Smokers may continue in their habit for many years with no apparent consequences until there is a big problem. As a result, people's health problems appear out of nowhere when they've been building for a long time.

Similarly, it took a long time before people began to see obvious evidence of climate change. People respond considerably better to evident threats, such as the obnoxious dog at the door than to threats that escalate swiftly and nonlinearly.

Third, many of the effects of climate change are inaccessible to most people. According to research on construal level theory, people interpret things that are psychologically remote from them (in time, geography, or social distance) as more abstract concepts than those that are psychologically close to them. Weather events that are most likely a result of climate change (such as wildfires or intense storms) tend to occur distant from where most people reside. As a result, most people aren't obliged to deal with the details of climate change; instead, they can regard it as a notion. Furthermore, abstract concepts do not compel people to behave as strongly as specific concepts.

Fourth, because the future is invariably riskier than the present, that is one of the reasons why people place such a high value on the present. After all, even if you save a lot of money for retirement, you don't know if you'll live long enough to enjoy it. Skeptics contend that the impact of human activities on climate will not necessarily have the catastrophic implications predicted by certain experts.