More than one-tenth of UK foreign aid spent on climate-related projects since 2010 has been channelled through consultancies, a new Carbon Brief investigation reveals.
To obtain these figures, Carbon Brief analysed more than 25,000 transactions listed on the government’s Development Tracker website from projects that contribute to the UK’s International Climate Finance (ICF).
While most UK climate funds are spent via large international bodies, such as the World Bank and UN agencies, a large proportion has been entrusted to the private sector.
At least £2.11bn has been handed to dozens of management consultancies, such as KPMG, PwC and Adam Smith International. They have provided guidance on everything from hydropower dam construction in Nepal to farm diversification in Ethiopia.
These consultancies are nearly all headquartered in the UK and other global-north countries. Experts tell Carbon Brief there is opposition among some developing countries to climate aid being funnelled first through foreign consultancies rather than disbursed directly via local actors.
This also comes at a time of wider scrutiny from politicians and academics of the outsized role relatively expensive private consultants play in public life.
Climate transactions
The UK has committed to providing “climate finance” to developing countries to help them deal with climate change. The government distributes this money primarily through ICF, which is part of the foreign-aid budget.
Most UK climate finance is spent via a combination of UN agencies, development banks, international NGOs, management consultancies, foreign governments and local charities.
These organisations are entrusted by government departments with carrying out projects, conducting research and dispersing funds in developing countries.
While much of the money will have gone directly to projects, all of these organisations take cuts along the way to pay staff and other expenses. The spending decisions they make affect how much of it ends up directly benefiting climate-vulnerable people and funding low-carbon infrastructure.
Data on all the financial transfers from the UK government to these entities can be found on the “transactions” section of every project page on the government’s Development Tracker website. This includes everything from accommodation costs for aid staff through to large contributions to UN funds.
In June 2023, Carbon Brief extracted transaction data from every ICF-tagged project on the government’s Development Tracker website.
(This includes every project that contains a component of climate-related funding, but many projects also cover other issues, such as education and healthcare. Therefore, figures are higher than Carbon Brief’s previous reporting on the climate-specific portions of these funds.)
In total, £19.12bn has been “disbursed” to or “placed at the disposal of” recipient agencies, governments and other entities between 2010 and 2023. In addition, a far smaller sum of £832.96m is classed as “expenditure”, which covers money spent on goods and services.
Of the funds disbursed, information is missing for £4.86bn worth of transactions, where “receiver organisation” is listed as “N/A” or similar.
Consultant spending
The government has channelled £2.52bn of its ICF-labelled funds – 13% of the total – through private companies. Most of this money, £2.11bn, was spent via organisations Carbon Brief has identified as consultancies.
This amounts to 11% of the total – or 15%, once anonymous transactions are excluded.
Broadly speaking, management consultancies are companies that provide advice on how to run other organisations more effectively. They range from small, specialist companies to the “big four” accounting firms, which are multinational companies and span a large range of activities.
The share of total spending placed at the disposal of these companies for climate-related projects, including the largest recipients, is shown in the chart below.
The UK government has both scaled up its spending on consultants and made it easier for public-sector bodies to hire them in recent years. At the same time, their role in public life has been under growing scrutiny. Academics, politicians and officials have criticised the “outsourcing” of responsibilities to expensive private contractors.
In 2020, UK Treasury minister Theodore Agnew warned that a growing reliance on consultants “infantilises the civil service”. A 2016 National Audit Office report found that hiring outside specialists cost the government twice as much as an equivalent staff member.
Responding to these concerns in her speech at the Labour party conference this week, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves vowed to “slash” consultancy spending by half, if her party wins the next election.
The Conservative government has cut overall foreign-aid spending in recent years, citing the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The data extracted by Carbon Brief shows that, while consultancy spending within climate-related funds has also dropped year-on-year since 2019, the proportion of these funds going to consultancies has remained fairly constant. Indeed, an investigation by Climate Home News in 2018 identified a similar proportion being funnelled to these organisations.
54 consultancies
The table below shows the 54 consultancies that have been handed UK government funds to carry out climate-related projects since 2011.
Nearly all of these consultancies are headquartered in developed countries – 49 in total – and 33 of those are based in the UK. (Some consultancies have large regional branches in developing countries, but these have been combined together for this analysis.)
(Carbon Brief also identified an additional 76 consultancies listed under “expenditures” that have been paid far smaller sums, totalling just £8.04m, to carry out “technical and advisory work”.)
The biggest consultancy recipient since 2011 has been Adam Smith International (ASI), a “global advisory company”, which has been handed a total of £333.21m. An ASI spokesperson tells Carbon Brief the organisation “[does] not recognise” the figure derived from UK government reporting.
ASI’s biggest climate-related project, for which it received £100.14m between 2012 and 2017, was the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF).
The consultancy led an international consortium that implemented this programme and provided advice to the Nigerian government. This included designing various climate-related projects such as rolling out solar mini-grids and clean cookstoves for rural areas.
According to ASI, “in the power sector, NIAF’s headline achievement has been its role in the privatisation process”. An ASI spokesperson tells Carbon Brief that, at the time the consultancy stopped managing the NIAF project in 2017, its “efforts to bolster the power supply” were saving Nigerian consumers more than £1bn per year.
The company has faced controversy in the past and was accused by MPs on the International Development Committee in 2017 of displaying a “serious lack of judgement”, following allegations that it had invented testimonials or pressured beneficiaries to provide positive feedback.
At the time, ASI issued a lengthy document responding to the allegations and stating it acted in “good faith”. It has continued to receive climate-related funds since, although its annual disbursements have dropped significantly since 2016.
The consultancy IMC Worldwide, which has now been renamed DT Global, has been another major recipient of UK climate-related funds, accruing £267.16m in total.
One of its larger projects is Accelerating Investment and Infrastructure in Nepal, for which it has received £12.88m to advise the Nepalese government. Specifically, for this project the consultancy’s focus has been overcoming “delivery bottlenecks” to making large-scale investments in projects such as hydropower dams.
Large portions of spending have also gone to “big four” firms KPMG and PwC. Across their UK-based operations and offices in developing countries, these companies have received £242.37m and £204.37m, respectively.
Across several regional offices, KPMG has received £242.37m in funds from the UK’s ICF budget. Its biggest project was the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters project, which saw KPMG East Africa handed £117.40m between 2014 and 2019.
This project involved KPMG managing grants awarded to 15 projects, ranging from helping farmers in Ethiopia to diversify their activities to preparing vulnerable people in Senegalese cities to prepare for flooding. The consultancy also monitored project progress.
PwC has received £204.37m in funds, including £33.81m for a project titled Private Sector Development programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2013 and 2022.
The consultancy implemented a component of the project called Essor, which focused on improving “the country’s business environment” and “equitable and affordable access to renewable energy”. This included developing a bidding process for solar mini-grids and attracting external investors to the DRC by identifying barriers to entry.
Local capacities
International climate finance is explicitly framed as a way for relatively wealthy, developed countries to support climate action in developing countries, given their greater responsibility for causing climate change and capacity for dealing with it.
Reliance on consultants from the global north to carry out climate-finance programmes overseas can, therefore, be contentious.
Clare Shakya, a climate finance expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), tells Carbon Brief that while consultancies tend not to be transparent about the rates they charge, she estimates they are in the region of 20% of the grant value.
Given this, Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh, tells Carbon Brief, the large amount of ICF funding that likely remains in developed countries is “against the spirit of supporting the development of local capacities”. He adds:
“Funding actions at the local level to tackle climate change, particularly adaptation, works best when investing in local capacities and communities rather than international consultants. There is a long history of sending international consultants to developing countries to assist in tackling climate change, which has not resulted in any real benefits after the international consultants leave the country.”
Faten Aggad, a climate diplomacy expert and adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town, tells Carbon Brief:
“Many international consultancy companies have no boots on the ground [and] recruit ad-hoc consultants – many of whom do not understand the context in which they operate.”
Least developed countries (LDCs) and small-island states, in particular, have pushed for funding for more long-term climate action rather than the project-based activities consultancies often support, according to Shakya. She adds:
“The poorest and most climate-impacted countries are clear that business-as-usual in climate finance is not working for them. Short-term projects driven by external experts are failing to provide the support they need to transform to low-carbon development and greater climate resilience.”
Some developing countries have also emphasised the need for climate finance that directly flows to local communities. The LDC group, which represents 47 nations at UN climate talks, has called for 70% of climate finance to support “local-level action” by 2030. LDC chair Madeleine Diouf Sarr tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s really important that climate finance that is available is spent wisely and used effectively. Climate finance must respond to and address the real needs and priorities of the countries it sets out to support, as identified by those countries.”
An ASI spokesperson tells Carbon Brief that the consultancy “ardently ensures optimal value for money in [its] projects”, with “competitively and responsibly structured” fees and “transparency in [its] financial dealings, including profitability and expenditure”.
They also state the organisation “places a paramount emphasis on both leveraging and strengthening local capacities in all our projects”, with the “majority” of ASI funds being used to engage national consultants and partner with local groups.
To illustrate this, they note that the NIAF programme in Nigeria increased its team composition from 60% to 80% Nigerian nationals during ASI’s tenure, and saw some consultants take up senior roles in the Nigerian government.
Both KPMG and PwC declined to comment on Carbon Brief’s findings or the criticism of consultancies running climate-finance projects. They also declined to share information on how much money they retain as fees for their services on these projects. DT Global did not respond to a request from Carbon Brief for comment.
The UK government declined to comment on its use of consultancies to administer climate-finance projects.
Other climate fund recipients
Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that most climate-related, foreign-aid spending is channelled into multilateral institutions, such as UN bodies and development banks. In total, they received £6.49bn – one-third of the total spending.
By far the largest recipient of UK disbursements is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – a branch of the World Bank that lends money to developing countries. It has received £1.40bn in total.
This is followed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Unicef and the UN World Food Programme, which received £1.01bn, £904.24m and £750.05m, respectively.
Joe Thwaites, a senior advocate for international climate finance at the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), tells Carbon Brief that the UK is generally “better” than other wealthy countries at distributing money via multilateral institutions.
He says this is often a more popular option with developing countries – as evidenced by the long push for a new “loss and damage” fund – because they can often have more input into how money is spent. Thwaites adds:
“When it’s a multilateral fund it’s easier to have a say…whereas, if you’re in a bilateral relationship, there’s a big power inequity there.”
Far less money is sent directly to governments and public-sector organisations – just £2.49bn in total. This is less than the money channelled via the private sector.
Roughly one-quarter of this public-sector money has gone to governments and agencies in developed countries. This could mean paying for anything from the UK Met Office helping with typhoon forecasting in the Philippines to the German development agency GIZ assisting with a water management project in South Africa.
This leaves just £1.86bn – or 13% of the UK’s climate-related spending since 2011 – that goes directly to governments in developing countries.
A small selection of developing-country governments have received large sums of money directly from ICF funds. For example, Ethiopia’s ministry of finance and economic development has received £509.52m and the government of the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has received £431.24m.
A large variety of NGOs have also received big disbursements from the UK government to carry out climate-related projects in developing countries.
While around £327.87m has gone to national NGOs located in target countries, far more – £1.87bn – has gone to large international NGOs, such as Population Service International (£116.84m), Norwegian Refugee Council (£97.47m) and Save the Children UK (£91.68m).
By far the largest NGO recipient has been BRAC, a Bangladesh-based international NGO, that has been given £448.07m, largely as part of a partnership to provide basic service to the poorest people in Bangladesh – including “increased access to climate resilient services”.
Methodology
In June 2023, Carbon Brief extracted data from the “transactions” tabs on every ICF Development Tracker page to understand which organisations were being given money by the UK government to carry out these projects. Data was extracted by Tom Prater using Import.io and Octoparse.
This analysis is based primarily on “disbursements” data – defined by the government as “the amount placed at the disposal of a recipient country or agency”. As well as projects that are 100% International Climate Finance (ICF), this data also covers projects that cover a mix of ICF and other types of development aid, such as education and healthcare.
The Development Tracker website includes data on “organisation type” for each transaction. However, this data was not included for around £4.54bn worth of transactions. Carbon Brief manually filled in missing entries where possible, using the same categories employed by the UK government and referring to the organisation profile pages on the global development news platform Devex as a guide.
Devex was also used by Carbon Brief to identify the country in which institutions were headquartered and whether they could be described as “consultancies”. For some smaller consultancies or ones that have been closed down, Carbon Brief identified them as consultancies using the UK government’s Companies House website.
Some transactions could not be assigned an organisation type or any other details. Examples include those listed as “corrections” or “journal transactions”, which indicate cases where accounting corrections have been made. In some cases, the name of the organisation is “withheld”.
This analysis covers transaction data listed for ICF projects overseen by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). However, the majority of transactions listed under BEIS and Defra did not provide information about which organisations were involved.
The post Revealed: Tenth of UK’s climate-aid spending goes via private consultancies appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Tenth of UK’s climate-aid spending goes via private consultancies
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.”
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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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The post Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action
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Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
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Renewable Energy9 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
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Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
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Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测