Two-thirds of people see ‘climate emergency’

Nearly two-thirds of 1.2 million people polled worldwide say humanity faces a climate emergency, according to a UN survey, the largest of its kind ever undertaken.

Young and old, rich and poor, respondents in 50 nations home to more than half the global population also chose from a score of policy options to tackle the problem, researchers at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the University of Oxford reported yesterday.

The findings suggest the grassroots global climate movement that surged onto the world stage in 2019 -- led, in part, by a then 16-year Greta Thunberg of Sweden -- is still gaining momentum, even if a raging pandemic has obscured its scope.

"Concern about the climate emergency is far more widespread than we knew before," Stephen Fisher, a sociologist at Oxford who helped design the survey and process the data, told AFP in an interview.

"And the large majority of those who do recognise a climate emergency want urgent and comprehensive action."  

In a clever innovation, the short survey popped up like an advertisement on cell phone game apps, giving researchers access to demographics that might not otherwise respond to a public opinion poll.

At the national level, some 80% of people in Britain, Italy and Japan expressed serious foreboding about the impact of climate change, which has -- with a single degree of warming so far -- measurably increased the intensity of heatwaves, drought and flood-inducing rainfall, as well as storms made more destructive by rising seas.

France, Germany, South Africa and Canada were close behind, with more than three-quarters of those polled describing the threat as a "global emergency".  

In another dozen countries -- including the United States, Russia, Vietnam and Brazil -- two-thirds of respondents saw things the same way.