Poll: Just 60% of Australians believe ‘climate disruption is of anthropogenic origin’
Despite Australia’s many extreme weather events, just 60% of people there accept that ‘climate disruption’ is caused by humans – a fall of 6 percentage points from a previous survey and behind the global average of 73%, according to French polling company Elabe.
Commissioned by the international waste and recycling company Veolia, the polling covers countries representing 67% of global greenhouse gas emissions, including Brazil, Spain, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Germany, the UK and the US.
The results suggest higher levels of climate change denial, scepticism and uncertainty than polls carried only in Australia, although the methodologies and questions are not directly comparable, the Guardian reported on Sunday.
Rise in climate deniers becoming a global trend
Only 52% of Australians – the lowest percentage of any country part of the survey – thought “the costs caused by the damage linked to climate disruption and pollution are going to be greater than the investments needed for the ecological transition of our societies.”
The polling suggests that Australia is following a global trend of a rise in climate deniers. It found that 78% of respondents in the country agreed climate disruption was happening, compared to 89% globally. Only residents of Ivory Coast had lower levels of acceptance.
But Dr Graham Bradley, a research fellow at Griffith University in South East Queensland on the east coast of Australia, questioned whether the term “climate disruption” was commonly understood. That was a problem that could skew the results, he noted.
80% of global community seek stronger climate action
Conducted for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and backed by the University of Oxford and GeoPoll, the Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024 collected opinions on climate change of over 73,000 people speaking 87 different languages across 77 countries.
It is the second edition of the global survey, finding that 80% of the global community – or four out of five people – seek stronger action from their governments against climate change, and 86% seek their countries set aside geopolitical problems for the cause.
The survey noted sizeable support for stronger climate action in 20 of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters globally. It also found considerable support in favour of a quick phaseout of fossil fuels. Only 7% of the respondents said their country should not transition at all.
