New research by University of Oxford researchers from the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School , Saïd Business School and Smith School of Enterprise and Environment finds that policymakers, politicians and other policy officials greatly underestimate the public's willingness to contribute to climate action.
The findings come after recent clamours for a reset on climate policies from leading political figures due to a claimed lack of public support .
Building on prior research that found that 69% of the general public support climate action, the new paper shows that policymakers surveyed by the researchers estimated this figure at just 37%.
Co-author Dr Stefania Innocenti , Associate Professor and leader of the Behaviour and the Environment research group at Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, said:
'Policymakers' decisions can be influenced by their perceptions of public opinion. It is possible that their underestimation of how much the public cares about climate change could limit their policy ambitions'.
Policymakers' decisions can be influenced by their perceptions of public opinion. It is possible that their underestimation of how much the public cares about climate change could limit their policy ambitions.
Dr Stefania Innocenti, Associate Professor, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
The research team asked 191 attendees of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) to estimate what percentage of the global population would say they are willing to give 1% of their salary to help fix climate change.
The attendees included politicians, individuals working at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, including at least 24 active policy negotiators.
The researchers do not call for the public to actually contribute their income; however, asking UNEA attendees to estimate the percentage of global citizens that support action on climate change identified a mismatch in perceptions.
Dr Ximeng Fang , lead author and Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, said:
'It's not just policymakers - our findings suggest that individuals playing a diversity of roles at international environmental governance meetings could be operating under the assumption of a weaker public mandate for climate action than reality'.
The fact the delegates seem to underestimate global support for climate action to a similar extent as the general public-despite higher personal engagement and greater climate expertise-raises questions for future research, say the authors.
Dr Innocenti continued: 'There are some plausible explanations for our results, which include the impact of news media and lobbying and the frequency of exposure to individuals with particular ideological viewpoints. While more research is needed before we can say for sure why policymakers underestimate the public on climate change by such a high degree, our results suggest the presence of misperceptions'.
Co-author Dr Joshua Ettinger , former University of Oxford DPhil researcher and now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication, said:
'I hope our research encourages policy officials to be braver and pursue more ambitious climate policies. They have more public support than they may realise'.
Read ' United Nations Environment Assembly attendees underestimate public willingness to contribute to climate action ' in full in Nature.
