Whither the 'green wave'?

Has the green wave peaked? The Economist reported last week that there had been a marked decline in belief in man-made climate change, notably in the US. Citing recent data from Pew, they noted that the proportions believing that the climate was changing, and that human activity was responsible, had dropped from 47% in April 2008 to 36% last month.

Polling in this area is, admittedly, treacherous territory. People's understanding of climate science is hazy. It's one of those areas where they are apt to say one thing and do another. It matters very much what question you ask people (and even what time of year you ask them, which may be a factor in the recent Pew trend in the US). And in a politically charged debate, those seeking to assert that public opinion is on their side can probably find polling data to support their case. We may well examine some more of it in future weeks.

But our data doesn't back up the Economist's thesis. We've been tracking public attitudes around climate change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the previous peak of environmental concern. While concern fell off markedly in the years following Rio, since the late Nineties, it has been back on an upward curve, and across the 13 countries that we've been able to track consistently since then, the proportion rating climate change as a 'very serious' problem has risen from 43% in 1998 to 62% today. Crucially, the increase has continued this year, albeit at a slower rate - even in the teeth of a global recession.

So what is happening, then? What's clear is that the tumult engulfing the world's markets and the chill economic wind has knocked the environment off the headlines - at least until the Copenhagen hoopla began. So as you'd expect, we've seen the proportions of people in our global tracking spontaneously naming environmental problems as the 'biggest issue facing our country' fall back signficantly - it's a volatile measure that moves up and down according to what's been in the news lately. But underneath that, what's remarkable is the degree to which climate concern remains deeply embedded across many countries - the proportion, for instance, feeling that we need to take 'major steps very soon' to address climate change has remained broadly steady, at nearly two-thirds of the public (63%) across 19 countries.

All things considered, we think that what Pew and others' data shows is mostly that attention, for the moment, is elsewhere. The 'green wave' hasn't, in our view, peaked yet - not by a long way.