The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) held their spring meetings last week in Washington DC – a key event in a critical year for international climate finance.
As the two so-called Bretton Woods institutions mark their 80-year anniversary, they are under growing pressure to reform and deal with the “polycrisis” enveloping the world.
Many developing nations are struggling with growing food insecurity, income inequality and massive debts that are taking up much of their resources.
All of this is making it harder than ever for them to invest in low-carbon energy or prepare their citizens for the growing threat of climate change. At the same time, some wealthy countries have been scaling back their foreign-aid spending.
While the two financial institutions are undergoing reforms, including changes designed to help them tackle climate change, progress so far has been slow.
Developed countries pledged $11bn at the spring meetings to help boost the World Bank’s lending capacity. However, calls for new funds and debt relief for the world’s poorest countries remained largely unanswered.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explains the key outcomes from the spring meetings. The Q&A also looks ahead to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries are due to agree on a new climate finance target.
- Why are the World Bank and IMF spring meetings important for climate action?
- Are countries giving the World Bank more climate finance?
- What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?
- Did the spring meeting provide any debt relief for climate-vulnerable countries?
- Did leaders decide on ‘innovative’ new sources of climate finance?
- What comes next for global financial system reform?
Why are the World Bank and IMF spring meetings important for climate action?
Developing countries need large sums of money to address the climate and development challenges that they face.
An assessment by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) in 2022 concluded that developing and emerging countries – excluding China – need to invest $2.4tn every year, by 2030, to meet their climate goals. This amounts to a fourfold increase from current levels.
(In the report, China is considered alongside the “advanced economies” of Europe, North America and East Asia and the Pacific that see the majority of global climate investment.)
The same group stated that insufficient investment, particularly in emerging and developing economies, was the “primary reason” that the world was “badly off track” on the path to its Paris Agreement targets.
Meanwhile, the world’s poorest countries are facing what the World Bank has described as a “great reversal”, with surging debt distress, food insecurity and income inequality increasing since the Covid-19 pandemic. This “polycrisis” makes it harder for them to address climate change.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) distribute billions of dollars to developing countries every year, largely as loans. These banks are widely viewed as vital for expanding international climate finance and, as the largest MDB, the World Bank is expected to play a key role.
MDBs provided a record $60.9bn of climate finance to developing countries in 2022. However, IHLEG estimates that raising $2.4tn of investment for such nations would require around $250-300bn annually, by 2030, from MDBs and other development finance institutions.
Meanwhile, the IMF – which also lends money, but with a focus on financial stability rather than development – could play a vital role in aiding debt-laden countries that are also facing severe climate hazards.
Over the past year, the World Bank has been undertaking reforms as part of its “evolution roadmap” to increase its spending in developing countries, including more money for climate-related projects.
This came amid a broader push by a group of global-north and global-south nations for reforms to the international financial system – in part to scale up climate finance.
Progress has been slow. One review by the Centre for Global Development concluded that only one-fifth of the required reforms have been implemented by the World Bank so far and, in general, there has been uneven progress across the MDBs.
The spring meetings provided an opportunity for leaders to discuss the status of these activities and push for more progress.
Yet there remains a great deal of mistrust around the role of these institutions in addressing climate change from those who view them as complicit in many of the problems facing developing countries.
“The IMF, as well as the World Bank, contribute greatly to the economic entrapment of the global south,” Dr Fadhel Kaboub, a senior advisor at the thinktank Power Shift Africa, told a press briefing ahead of the spring meetings.
Issues highlighted by campaigners include what they regard as the IMF’s punitive policies for debt-laden countries and the World Bank’s continued financing of fossil-fuel projects.
Finally, the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the end of this year is expected to be the “finance COP”, with nations set to agree on a new climate-finance target to support developing countries.
Writing ahead of the spring meetings, Danny Scull, senior policy advisor for public banks and development at the thinktank E3G, explained that the spring meetings “will set the tone for a key year of transforming the international finance system, which is not limited to these DC-based institutions”.
Are countries giving the World Bank more climate finance?
At the end of this year, wealthy countries are due to “replenish” the International Development Association (IDA) – the arm of the World Bank that provides concessional and grant-based finance to the world’s poorest nations.
Given the challenges ahead, World Bank president Ajay Banga has stated that this replenishment should be the “largest of all time”, calling for $30bn in pledges. Such a commitment would allow IDA to lend more than $100bn.
Much of this money would be climate finance, as the World Bank has pledged to spend 35% of its funds on climate-related projects, rising to 45% by 2025.
Country surveys suggest that IDA funding tends to be well received by developing nations, compared to other sources of funding. However, developed countries such as the US and Germany have reduced their IDA pledges in recent years. Many have cut the foreign aid budgets from which their IDA contributions are drawn.
The last IDA contribution by the UK for example, was less than half its previous one. The government stated in 2022 that it planned to spend more on direct country programmes in order to “control how exactly taxpayers’ money is used to support our priorities”.
Some nations, such as the US, have stressed the need for the World Bank to do more with its existing resources, rather than relying on new investments from donor countries. (See: What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?)
According to the thinktank E3G, an “ambitious” IDA replenishment by wealthy nations would go some way to “re-establish[ing] trust with developing countries” – particularly those in Africa, where more than half of the IDA-eligible states are located.
A report released by the G20 Independent Expert Group last year describes IDA as “the largest source of long-term, cheap financing to low-income countries”, but adds that it is currently “too small to properly address the needs for [climate] adaptation, resilience and mitigation”.
The group therefore recommends a tripling of finance from IDA. This would require a “sharp” increase in contributions from donor countries.
The spring meetings provided a space for discussion of IDA replenishment, which Banga made clear was one of his priorities. A replenishment meeting taking place the week after the event is expected to provide more clarity on how much countries will donate.
What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?
The World Bank is under pressure to change the way it operates and assesses risk in its lending, in order to “unlock” more money from existing funds.
In 2022, an influential report for G20 finance ministers into “capital adequacy frameworks” highlighted measures that it said could unlock “several hundreds of billions of dollars” in extra lending from MDBs.
Crucially, the expert group said this could be done without threatening the financial stability or credit ratings of these banks.
The World Bank has already announced various measures over the past few months to boost lending. However, observers say further steps are needed.
A study by the consultancy Risk Control, which assessed the impact of the G20 report’s proposals, concluded that they could unlock an extra $162bn in lending over a decade from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) – the arm of the World Bank that focuses on middle-income countries.
It also concluded that the reforms could free up an extra $27bn in lending from the IDA.
Speaking to journalists during the spring meetings, Banga said that the World Bank was working through 27 recommendations from the G20 report that apply to the institution.
Franklin Steves, a senior policy adviser in sustainable finance at E3G, tells Carbon Brief that rapid progress was not expected at the meetings:
“There are lots and lots of political, but also legal and technocratic, issues around how the bank and also the other MDBs can implement those measures. They are going to take a lot of time to work through.”
Nevertheless, the spring meetings did see some progress in the World Bank’s reforms programme. Rich countries pledged a total of $11bn towards new instruments that the World Bank has set up as part of its effort to increase lending capacity.
The US, France, Japan and Belgium committed funds to the portfolio guarantee platform. This money will be available to pay off borrowers’ debts if necessary, allowing the World Bank to lend money more freely.
Separately, a group of countries including Germany, Denmark and the UK contributed to the World Bank’s hybrid capital mechanism. This allows shareholders to raise new funds by investing in special bonds from the bank.
According to the World Bank, in total these additional funds will allow it to lend an extra $70bn over the next 10 years.
Generally, the spring meetings also highlighted the World Bank’s interest in working more with the private sector to mobilise finance for renewable energy and other key investments. In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Banga said:
“The reality is that that gap between tens and hundreds of billions to trillions is not a number that the bank can fill…That’s why you do eventually need the private sector.”
The World Bank president’s language mirrors that of other leaders, such as former US climate envoy John Kerry, who has stated repeatedly that “no government in the world” has enough funds to address climate change on its own.
Banga said the bank was working to address regulatory uncertainties in developing countries, foreign currency risk and protecting private investors from war and other unrest.
At the spring meetings, the bank also launched a new partnership with the African Development Bank and private partners to provide 300 million people in Africa with access to electricity by 2030.
This approach has faced criticism from campaigners, who argue that the private sector has so far failed to mobilise significant climate finance for developing countries.
A report from the Bretton Woods Project launched just before the spring meetings concluded that creating “bankable” low-carbon projects in developing countries is “far from straightforward”. It also noted that ensuring such bankability can clash with the interests of citizens in those countries and jeopardise a “just energy transition”.
Did the spring meeting provide any debt relief for climate-vulnerable countries?
Just ahead of the meetings, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva was chosen for another five-year term as the IMF managing director. Her reappointment comes at a fraught time for the institution, as the world faces a mounting global debt crisis.
This issue is rising up the global agenda, with newspaper editorials and prominent figures calling for action to help debt-laden developing countries.
Around 60% of low-income nations are trapped in a cycle of paying off debt, which was exacerbated by borrowing during the Covid-19 pandemic and a surge in interest rates.
Developing countries spent $443.5bn on servicing their debts in 2022. Analysis by the ONE campaign concluded that, as of 2024, more money is flowing out of developed countries to service their debts than is flowing into their governments from external sources.
Many countries, particularly in Africa, are spending more on interest payments than on healthcare, education or climate action. This is particularly problematic for debt-laden nations – such as Malawi – which are dealing with climate-driven disasters and need to spend money on recovery and adaptation.
Analysis by the Debt Relief for Green and Inclusive Recovery (DRGR) project found that among 66 of the world’s most economically vulnerable nations, 47 will likely face insolvency in the next five years if they invest the amounts required to meet their climate and development goals.
Many civil society groups blame the IMF for contributing to these issues. Its approach of encouraging austerity policies so that countries can pay off debts has been responsible for “keep[ing] developing countries in a cycle of crisis”, according to a statement released by ActionAid USA country director Niranjali Amerasinghe.
Moreover, according to E3G, the role of the US Federal Reserve in increasing borrowing costs and the failure of wealthy countries to provide debt relief has been “tremendously
corrosive to trust” with developing countries.
Ahead of the spring meetings, civil society groups and academics called for major interventions to address these issues, such as the immediate cancellation of public debt payments for African countries and the “urgent reform” of the G20 “common framework”.
Wealthy creditor nations in the G20 established the common framework in 2020 to help coordinate the restructuring of debts. However, despite the high demand, only four developing countries have used it so far and it has been widely dismissed as inadequate.
Marina Zucker-Marques, a senior academic researcher in global economic governance at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, tells Carbon Brief:
“What is happening today is that countries are defaulting on their development priorities and climate priorities instead of defaulting on their debt.…[They are] doing this because it’s very difficult to get your debt restructured within the common framework.”
One issue is debt sustainability analysis, which is meant to guide the borrowing decisions of low-income countries. As it stands, this calculation of how much money countries can pay towards their debt obligations does not account for their social, development and climate needs.
At the spring meetings, the IMF and the World Bank started discussions of how to reform this analysis to account for climate action and other issues. “This is a welcome path, but it’s something that is going to take two or three years to have a result,” Zucker-Marques explains.
The meetings also saw the launch of an independent review into the links between sovereign debt, nature and climate change, which will consider potential solutions such as debt for nature or climate swaps.
Did leaders decide on ‘innovative’ new sources of climate finance?
Raising the large sums of money required to tackle climate change is expected to involve tapping new sources of finance. Some of these sources were discussed during the spring meetings.
Representatives from a small group of global-north and global-south countries met on the sidelines of the event in the second ever in-person meeting of the international tax task force.
The goal of this initiative is to analyse and design new forms of taxation that could be used to raise money for climate and development needs. Options being considered include taxes on fossil-fuel producers, shipping fuel, air travel and financial transactions.
The group, co-chaired by France, Barbados and Kenya, was joined by Colombia at the event, bringing its total membership up to eight.
Kenyan climate change envoy Ali Mohamed said in a statement that their goal was to “raise much needed financing to tackle climate change while having minimal impact on ordinary people”.
The task force’s ambition is to present one or more options for taxes at COP30 in 2025, with the goal of gathering a coalition of nations that would be willing to implement them. It will present its initial findings at COP29 in Baku.
Meanwhile, there was growing momentum around the idea of a global tax on billionaires, in part to pay for climate action. A “wealth tax” of 2%, which could raise $250bn each year, was initially proposed by G20 chair Brazil in February, but received support from other leaders at the spring meetings, including IMF head Georgieva.
The concept will be developed further and presented at a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in July.
Finally, there was a lot of pressure from NGOs at the spring meetings to shift World Bank finance away from fossil fuels and into low-carbon energy sources. Three US senators also issued a public letter to Banga asking him to commit to ending fossil-fuel financing.
Oil Change International analysis shows that the bank was providing roughly $1.2bn a year to fossil fuel projects in developing countries, between 2020 and 2022. This is in spite of the World Bank committing to “align” all of its lending with the Paris Agreement as of July 2023.
Paola Yanguas Parra, a policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, tells Carbon Brief that current geopolitics are making calls to end fossil-fuel financing harder. “There is a lot of ‘gas as transition fuel’ and ‘gas as development’ being supported [by the World Bank],” she says.
In the end, there was no commitment from the World Bank to change its policies on fossil-fuel financing.
What comes next for global financial system reform?
This year is set to be a critical milestone for international climate finance.
When nations gather in Baku for COP29 in November, they will decide on a “new collective quantified goal” for providing climate finance to developing countries. This will replace the $100bn annual goal, which developed countries may finally have met in 2022, two years after the 2020 deadline.
The COP29 presidency hosted a “dialogue on enabling global action for climate finance” at the spring meetings, which saw president-designate Mukhtar Babayev sketch out broad priorities for the new climate-finance goal.
Other international events will feed into the climate summit and give a sense of progress towards international financial system reforms. In particular, G20 host Brazil will oversee continued discussions around finance at a meeting in July.
The World Bank and IMF annual meetings will then take place in October, shortly before COP29.
The post Q&A: Climate finance at World Bank and IMF spring meetings 2024 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Climate finance at World Bank and IMF spring meetings 2024
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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:
| Experiment | What they did |
| Survey one | Participants were asked if they were willing to donate 1% of their household income to WWF – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many actually donated to the charity. |
| Survey two | Participants read a constitutional complaint against the German government, led by Greenpeace, which demands for stricter climate policies. They were asked if they were willing to participate as a claimant and/or donate to the cause – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many went on to support the complaint. |
| Survey three | Participants were requested to complete an online “work for environmental protection task” where the more “pages” they completed resulted in more donations to WWF. They then predicted how many pages their peers completed. Participants also rated their individual behaviours and support for eight climate policies and then estimated the same for other people. |
| Surveys four and five | Participants were split into three groups that were either informed that 4% of participants had donated 1% of their household income to WWF, that “68% were willing to contribute” or given no information. They then had to state whether they were willing to support WWF and then were given the opportunity to do so. |
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.
Tiede, K.E. et al. (2026) People systematically under- and overestimate public engagement in climate action, Nature Climate Change, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02668-z
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