The general public often underestimate support for climate action, while overestimating the real-world actions taken by other people to address the problem, according to new research.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, explores the differences between people’s support for climate change, their behaviour and their assumptions about other people’s behaviour.

It is based on multiple surveys of more than 5,000 people across Germany and the US.

The study expands on previous research on how the general public systematically underestimate the climate commitment of their peers.

The difference between actual and perceived support for climate action among the public is sometimes known as a “perception gap”.

The surveys tested how people’s perceptions of climate attitudes and behaviours relate to their own willingness to contribute and undertake “climate-friendly” actions.

One of the authors tells Carbon Brief that this perception gap is not due to “ignorance or bias”, but because “people are just not good at making good estimations”.

The research also reveals that people’s opinions and behaviours are more “nuanced than previously assumed” and suggests that simply “correcting misperceptions” does not automatically lead to greater climate action.

Measuring climate actions

The study notes that correcting the perception gap is often seen as a “cost-effective” way to promote public engagement and drive action to reduce the intensification and impacts of climate change.

Most studies that explore the perception gap have primarily focused on surveys that have asked people to report their willingness to support climate change.

In other words, researchers have relied upon people saying they would support efforts to tackle climate change, rather than measuring people’s real-world actions, such as financial donations, attending protests or changing their behaviour.

To fill this gap, the researchers behind the new study surveyed a total of more than 5,000 people in Germany and the US over 2024-25. Surveys were split across five different experiments, each focused on public perceptions of climate attitudes and how they relate to individuals’ actual behaviour:

The authors note that Germany and the US are two of the “top 10 CO2 emitters” and are places where climate action is “especially necessary”. However, they add that the two countries are not reflective of “diverse cultural contexts” and further research is needed across the world.

The perception gap

The researchers find that most of their participants supported climate action, but much fewer actually performed verifiable behaviours.

For example, survey one finds that 37% of participants said they were willing to donate to WWF, yet just 4% did when given the opportunity.

Participants generally overestimated the climate actions of their peers, predicting that 23% of other people donated. Willingness, on the other hand, was slightly underestimated with respondents averaging around 34%.

The results from survey three suggest that this perception gap is likely due to general cognitive processes within the human brain that make accurate estimations about large groups difficult, say the authors.

The chart below shows the actual percentage of people who supported different environmental policies and performed climate-friendly behaviours (blue dots) compared to average predictions from the surveys (red dots).

They reveal a “consistent pattern” where “small proportions were overestimated and large ones were underestimated”, the authors say, driving predictions towards the middle. This phenomenon is known as “regression to the mean”.

In other words, where public support for a policy was high, participants in the survey estimated it was lower than it was. When the support was lower, estimates would be higher.

The study finds that individual and environmental factors played a role in shaping people’s perceptions of their peers’ climate actions, which were distinct from general misestimations.

For example, people who were already involved in climate action, had more frequent climate discussions and consumed more climate-focused news and media predicted a higher proportion of climate support “across the board”.

The results from the fourth and fifth surveys show that knowing the context of other people’s beliefs and behaviour in surveys can impact the attitudes of participants.

Participants that were told that 68% of people were willing to donate 1% of their household income to the WWF were more willing to donate.

In contrast, participants that were told that 4% of people actually donated did not report more willingness to “discuss climate change, sign petitions or donate” than the control group.

However, there was no obvious impact on actual donations for any of the three groups, the study notes.

Lead study author Dr Kevin Tiede, scientific managing director of the Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour at the University of Erfurt, tells Carbon Brief that the findings suggest that “just telling people how many people support climate action is likely not enough to really change something”.

However, Tiede adds that “direct comparability” between people saying they would donate and actually donating is “limited” and that giving people more time to answer and autonomy over where to donate might result in more people taking action.

‘Pluralistic ignorance’

Tiede explains that the study findings demonstrate the existence of “pluralistic ignorance”, where a person believes their own views differ from the majority.

For climate change, this means that the “vast majority of people around the world support climate action, but people considerably underestimate the extent of this support”, the study says.

However, the surveys reveal that pluralistic ignorance “in the climate domain” is more nuanced than previously thought, say the authors.

Prof Madalina Vascleanu, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that encouraging climate action is complex.

It may take multiple and repeated “attempts” at effective communication, or for people to directly “experience” the “norm” that climate change is widely supported, she says, rather than simply being told.

“Observable” behaviours, such as “identity signalling” – which could involve anything from protesting to vegetarianism – might have more of an impact on encouraging climate action among peers than “private behaviours like donations”, she adds.

The study is a “great addition to the literature”, Vascleanu says, because “correcting” the perception gap did not have an effect on climate-friendly behaviour, as “scholars had previously assumed”. She adds that it has “sparked several new hypotheses” that her “lab is now working on”.

Prof Mauro Bertolotti, associate professor of social psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, explains that the “attitude-behaviour gap” revealed by the research is a “rather common finding”.

However, he is “sceptical” of the “simplified and abstract” measures, warning that experiment environments often come with “assumptions and expectations” that are different from real life.

As a result, they might not “replicate” the process people go through when choosing to “make a donation to an environmental cause”, he says.

‘Targeted’ communication strategies

The researchers argue that it is more effective to focus on “targeted” communication strategies – encouraging climate-friendly behaviours that aim to reach the majority who already support climate action, rather than trying to convert climate sceptics.

They call for attention to be paid to the attitude-behaviour gap between people saying they support efforts to tackle climate change and following up with real-world climate actions.

The study suggests strategies for decision-makers to reduce the attitude-behaviour gap, such as “facilitating climate-friendly behaviour” with “convenience and subsidies”. They also recommend ensuring environmental policy prioritises fairness to gain visible and widespread public support.

They add that the public would benefit from understanding the “effectiveness and co-benefits” of climate action.

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The post Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action

The spiking price of oil helped increase global sales of electric cars in the second quarter of 2026 despite total car sales falling, a new International Energy Agency (IEA) report shows.

The IEA’s latest update on the market for electric cars said sales increased by 4% in the second quarter, after the war between the US, Israel and Iran disrupted oil supplies around the world and caused oil prices to jump at the end of February.

The increase in electric car sales was achieved despite customers buying fewer vehicles in total due to economic problems and, in China, a reduction in government subsidies for cheap cars. Total car sales fell 5% globally in the first half of 2026.

“While a lag in consumer responses and policy implementation means the full effects will take time to materialise, the crisis has clearly reinforced the case for [electric vehicles] as a way to address energy security and fuel cost concerns,” the IEA’s report said.

The IEA predicts that sales of electric cars will speed up in the second half of the year, increasing by 10% for 2026 in total compared to 2025. Electric car sales will be 29% of total car sales over the full year, it forecasts, up from 24% in the first half.

The IEA expects sales of fossil fuel-reliant internal combustion engine vehicles to continue declining, as they have been doing for a decade because of economic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic and, since around 2020, the rise of electric cars.

Road transport – which also includes two- and three-wheeled vehicles like scooters and rickshaws – currently accounts for half of global oil use. The oil industry has been trying to expand markets in newer, growing sectors like plastic to replace its declining business in petrol and diesel for road transport.

Pro-EV policies

As well as the higher oil price, the IEA said this year’s electric car boom is being driven in some countries – particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia – by government policies that have been put in place since the Iran war blocked shipping of oil and other commodities through the Strait of Hormuz.

It highlighted the Netherlands and Ireland, which have both announced subsidies for scrapping old internal combustion engine cars and replacing them with electric ones.

Australia, Spain, Chile, Vietnam and the US state of California have introduced, or are introducing, tax benefits for electric cars.

Australia, the UK and Hungary have announced funding or support for charging infrastructure, while Cambodia, Brazil and Kenya have reduced taxes on imports of electric vehicles.

Growth in electric car sales was particularly strong in Europe, Brazil, Australia, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Colombia, South Africa and New Zealand.

On the other hand, electric car sales fell 16% in China – the world’s biggest electric car-buying country – in the second quarter. This was driven by a decline in total car sales, which was more extreme for internal combustion engine cars than electric ones.

In the US, electric car sales rose 20% in the second quarter compared with the first quarter of 2026. But this was about 25% less than in the same period of 2025, when Americans were taking advantage of expiring Biden-era federal tax credits.

These statistics back up Climate Home News’ reporting from the ground since the oil price spiked. As we reported from Yemen in May, the IEA data shows Chinese electric car companies are having success in the Middle East.

And as our correspondents found in Nepal and Bangladesh, there has been a surge of interest in electric vehicles across Asian countries outside of China. Yet while EV adoption in Nepal has been enabled by investments in charging and import subsidies, drivers in Bangladesh have been put off by a lack of chargers and high prices for electric two-wheelers.

The post Hormuz crisis speeds up transition to electric cars, IEA data shows appeared first on Climate Home News.

Hormuz crisis speeds up transition to electric cars, IEA data shows

A UN effort to keep the threatened 1.5C warming limit alive is exposing deep divisions over the future of fossil fuels, pitting climate-vulnerable nations seeking a faster move away from coal, oil and gas against major emerging economies and producers that oppose targeting particular energy sources.

As countries weigh in on the “Belém Mission to 1.5”, a new process launched at COP30 last year to address the global shortfall in climate ambition, submissions show that small island nations and least developed countries (LDCs) want the initiative to help speed up a shift away from fossil fuels. Their calls for a focus on emissions-cutting measures in the energy sector are supported by the EU and the UK.

But the “like-minded developing countries” (LMDC) bloc – which includes China, India – and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have warned against singling out specific energy sources or using the mission to assess how individual countries are performing on emissions cuts. Instead, they want its scope narrowed to identifying primarily what rich countries should do to cut their own emissions and provide more climate cash to developing nations.

Keeping 1.5C “within reach”

The split hints at a fight to come at COP31 in November over what the work programme’s findings should say and how much weight they should carry in the summit’s outcome.

Governments launched the Belém Mission to 1.5 at last year’s UN climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city, after the latest round of national climate plans left the world set to shoot past the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Full implementation of current pledges is expected to limit global warming to only around 2.3-2.5 C by 2100, according to the UN. 

Comment: The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

The current and two preceding COP presidencies – Türkiye, Brazil and Azerbaijan – are gathering views from governments on how to raise the ambition of national climate plans (NDCs) and adaptation plans (NAPs).

The initiative will culminate in a report at COP31 outlining priority actions for keeping the 1.5C goal “within reach”. But the proposals submitted by individual governments and negotiating blocs representing nearly four-fifths of all countries point to wildly diverging visions of what the Belém Mission should achieve, especially on the transition away from fossil fuels. 

Tracking COP28 commitments

The Marshall Islands has proposed an ambitious package of concrete actions that would enable deep emissions reductions, led by a global commitment to build no new oil, coal and gas infrastructure. Together with its fellow Pacific island of Vanuatu, it also calls for a formal process to monitor progress towards the COP28 energy commitments, map fossil fuel subsidies and help countries phase them out.

The EU also said in its submission that the Mission to 1.5C is “well placed” to provide updates on how countries’ national climate plans have incorporated the COP28 agreement, including the commitment to accelerate a transition from fossil fuels in energy systems.

Countries wanting to build on the COP28 Dubai agreement have struggled to find a dedicated space for those discussions in the face of opposition from fossil fuel producers and big emerging economies.

The COP28 outcomes in response to the first stocktake of global climate action represent “one package… and not a pick-and-choose menu”, the European Commission emphasised in a thinly veiled reference to comments made by the Saudi energy minister in 2024 that the Dubai deal was an “à la carte menu” allowing nations to choose their own priority. 

Push to boost NDC ambition

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) also advocated in its submission for “high-level approaches” towards developed countries and other major emitters ahead of COP31 to spur them to produce updated NDCs with additional emissions-cutting measures. 

Vanuatu called on the COP presidencies overseeing the Mission to 1.5C to “exhibit leadership” by taking steps at home to phase out fossil fuels and reduce their “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.

Azerbaijan and Türkiye continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels in their energy systems, while Azerbaijan and Brazil remain significant oil and gas producers with plans to expand output.

In its submission, the LDC group of the world’s poorest nations says the failure to align global climate commitments with a pathway to keep warming under 1.5C is driven primarily by insufficient ambition from major emitters.

The Mission to 1.5C should focus its efforts on the “highest-impact” and “most feasible” solutions to curb emissions such as phasing out fossil fuels, it added.

Both the island nations and the LDCs, as well as the African group of nations, stress that significantly scaling up financial resources, and making it easier to access them, are necessary steps to enable the global energy transition.

Focus on “emissions”, not energy sources

Fossil fuel producers and several large developing economies, however, argue that the mission risks straying beyond its mandate if it singles out particular fuels or evaluates countries’ climate plans.

The Arab group, which is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, wrote that it should maintain a focus on “emissions management” rather than targeting specific sectors or energy sources.

Their submission says investments in fossil fuels “must increase” both to better manage the emissions associated with their production and to meet growing energy demand.

The LMDCs, a negotiating bloc that includes China and India, similarly argue that climate action should address emissions regardless of how they are produced, warning that energy sources should not be traded off against the need for growth. “Poverty eradication and sustainable development remain a key challenge for developing countries, which cannot be compromised in the name of 1.5°C,” the group’s submission says.

No “parallel” processes

For both Arab states and LMDCs, the mission’s primary goal should be to identify how rich countries that are historically responsible for the bulk of emissions can be required to further cut their greenhouse gases and channel more money to developing countries. 

Both groups also caution against allowing the initiative to evolve into what they describe as a “parallel process” that could assess countries’ climate plans or create new expectations for what developing countries should do. Instead, they argue, it should simply produce a report identifying options for international cooperation.

The two sides disagree just as sharply on what should happen to the mission’s report once it lands. AOSIS and the LDC group explicitly want its findings carried forward into the COP31 outcome decision text and used to inform future negotiating rounds. The LMDC bloc, on the other hand, wants a guarantee that the report will not be used to support other processes.

The post UN bid to keep 1.5C alive exposes deepening divisions over fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

UN bid to keep 1.5C alive exposes deepening divisions over fossil fuels