The gap between concern about climate change and knowledge about climate change is something that recurs a lot in my work. A couple of times a week I’ll hear something misguided or incorrect about climate change from someone who says they understand it and care about it. This week’s highlight was someone who works for the airport telling a roomful of people that the most important thing is the little personal actions we can make in our own lives.
I try not to judge people for this – almost nobody was taught anything about climate change at school. Misinformation is rife. The internet is just as likely to tell you lies as truth, depending on what you look for. But it doesn’t half get in the way of climate action.
This is a wider problem around the world, it turns out. Allianz have just released a report into climate literacy in a number of different countries. While concern is high – 73% in the UK – climate literacy is not. Just 9% of Brits have a good grasp of the subject.
Among the knowledge gaps are the damage it may cause. Exactly 50% of Brits polled recognised that higher temperatures would be damaging, rather than something we can simply adapt to. Most people don’t know that we need to reduce emissions, which is troubling.
What’s more troubling is that climate literacy rates are falling, and fewer people know the right answers to climate questions that when Allianz last ran this survey in 2021. Contrary to what one might expect, young people don’t know better either – 46% of the ‘baby boomer’ generation have low climate literacy, compared to 52% of ‘generation Z’.
This is a fairly spectacular failure of climate education, although the survey does show that some countries have got it right. Italy was the first country to put climate change into the national curriculum, and lo and behold it’s the only country surveyed where young people know more about it than their elders. Brazil is also scoring better than many others.
The report shows that people with high climate literacy are much more proactive in doing something about it, so it is disturbing that climate literacy rates are actually in decline. And if we want to do something about this, now is a good time to invest more in climate communications and education.
The Earthbound Report 