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Scientists are the most trusted source of information for climate change in some of the largest global-south countries, ranking above newspapers, friends and social media.
This is according to a survey of 8,400 people across Chile, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Vietnam, the results of which have been published in Nature Climate Change.
The study finds that trusting and paying attention to climate scientists was associated with increased climate knowledge, roughly twice the effect size associated with a college degree.
One scientist who was not involved in the research says the findings suggest there is an opportunity to “bolster climate knowledge” in the global south by widening access to climate science information.
When asked to rank how important climate change is for their country, participants rated the issue as high, with the average score for each country above 4.4.
However, when asked to rank the importance of climate change compared to other key social issues, respondents – on average – ranked taking action on climate change ninth out of 13, after improving healthcare, decreasing corruption and increasing employment.
Another expert not involved in the study says the results highlight a “crucial tension” between “strong” public concern about climate change and the perception that other social issues should take priority when allocating “scarce” public resources.
Global-south focus
The impacts of climate change are disproportionately felt by the poorest members of society, who often live in the global south.
Nevertheless, Dr Luis Sebastian Contreras Huerta – a researcher in experimental psychology at Chile’s Universidad Adolfo Ibanez – tells Carbon Brief that research on climate attitudes has been “heavily biased” toward the global north.
Voices from the global south are “often invisible in science”, he adds.
Huerta was not involved in the study, but has published research using surveys to assess public beliefs about climate change. He describes the new study – which is evenly distributed across Chile, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Vietnam – as “a valuable attempt to capture public views across Latin America, Africa and Asia”.
The seven countries featured in the research include six of the 20 largest in the global south and range from “the lower end of low-to-middle-income countries (Nigeria) to the low end of high-income countries (Chile)”, according to the study.
The survey was administered online by polling company YouGov between April and May 2023. Respondents could answer in English or in other “country-specific languages”. For example, respondents in Chile and Colombia had the option to carry out the survey in Spanish, while those in India could answer in Hindi.
Trust and attention
The authors asked survey respondents to rank 12 different sources of information about climate change, based on the attention they pay it and how much they trust it.
The average rankings are shown in the table below, where one indicates the highest level of attention or trust and 12 indicates the lowest.
The table shows that, on average, scientists are ranked the highest for both trust and attention.
The country-specific results show that scientists rank the highest in trust in every country except Vietnam, where they rank second highest after television programmes. Meanwhile, friends and religious leaders rank the lowest for trust.
Huerta says it is “encouraging” that the general public “tend to trust scientists as their main source of information”.
However, he warns Carbon Brief about “social desirability” – a phenomenon in which people respond to surveys in a way that they think will be viewed favourably by others. In this case, it means that “people may report higher trust in scientists and less reliance on social media than they actually practice”, Huerta explains.
Dr Charles Ogunbode is an assistant professor in applied psychology at the University of Nottingham. He is not involved in the paper, but has carried out research on public perceptions of climate change.
He tells Carbon Brief that the relatively low attention and trust shown to family and friends is a “remarkable finding that stands in contrast with conventional knowledge”. He continues:
“Previous psychological research on this topic (generally predominated by western samples) would support an expectation that people would have greater trust in interpersonal social referrents like friends and family…
“I think the findings from the study signal an opportunity to bolster climate knowledge in the global south by widening access to scientific information on climate change.”
Climate knowledge
The survey also assesses the level of climate knowledge of the respondents, by asking them to identify whether a series of statements are true, false, or if they are “not sure”.
More than 80% of respondents correctly identified that the following two statements are correct:
- Climate change is mainly caused by human activities.
- Warming leads to more extreme events, such as droughts, floods and storms.
Conversely, fewer than 20% of people correctly identified the following two statements as false:
- Nuclear power plants emit CO2 during operations.
- Today’s global CO2 concentration has occurred in the past 650,000 years.
Knowledge about climate change was “quite similar” across countries, according to the survey. However, the authors found that women are more likely to respond “not sure” than men.
The study finds that trusting and paying attention to climate scientists was associated with increased climate knowledge, roughly twice the effect size associated with a college degree.
Policy comparison
Early in the survey, respondents were asked to rank how important climate change is for their country on a scale from one to five. On average, all countries ranked climate change above 4.4 on this scale.
However, the survey later asked respondents to rank the 13 government programmes, including climate, healthcare and education, in order of importance.
The authors found that “addressing climate change” ranks at ninth, on average, across the seven countries.
Climate change ranks the highest in Vietnam, where it comes in second behind “decreasing political corruption”.
However, it ranks 10th in Nigeria and South Africa, beating only “improving public transport”, “improving access to credit” and “getting Covid-19 under control”.
Lead author Prof Richard Carson, a professor of economics at the University of California, tells Carbon Brief that asking respondents to rank different issues “provides a much richer picture of the structure of public opinion on climate issues” than asking them to rank issues separately. This, he says, is because it forces respondents to make “direct tradeoffs”.
The survey shows that “people might say that dealing with climate change matters – but this does not mean that they would place it on the leaderboard when it comes to priorities”, he adds.
Huerta – the experimental psychology researcher – tells Carbon Brief that results highlight “a crucial tension”. He explains:
“Athough people show strong concern for climate change, when it comes to allocating scarce public resources, priorities such as health, education, poverty reduction, and security often come first.”
He adds:
“People may genuinely care, but without clear, immediate benefits, climate action is often deprioritised – unlike issues such as air pollution, where the consequences and gains are more tangible.”
The authors also asked survey respondents to rank seven “health-related issues”, with respiratory problems consistently identified as the highest priority.
Huerta says the results show a “disconnection”, adding:
“People rank respiratory illness as a top health concern, but they do not always connect it with climate change more broadly. This highlights a key communication challenge for climate policy.”
Finally, the authors asked respondents to rank their preference for the use of a carbon tax. In keeping with the results above, “spend on education and health” ranks top of the list. This is followed by subsidising solar panels and investing in “clean research and development”.
Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau is a lecturer at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and was not involved in the study. She tells Carbon Brief that “the preference for earmarking carbon tax revenue for health, education and renewable energy subsidies aligns with community-based adaptation strategies, such as solar-powered solutions, that address immediate needs while building resilience”.
She suggests that prioritising policies that can tackle climate change alongside other social issues could “bridge the gap between climate action and local priorities”.
Next steps
The authors note that their survey could only be completed by people with access to the internet, meaning that it “systematically underrepresents those with lower income, living in rural areas and who are older”.
Only people over the age of 18 were allowed to complete the survey. Across the countries, the median age of respondents was 31 years old. There was also a slight skew towards men, who made up 55% of the respondents.
As such, some external experts pointed out that results could be skewed.
For example, Prof Tarun Khanna, a professor at Harvard Business School, notes that when ranking uses for carbon taxes, there was low support for policies such as returning money to the poor. He questions whether this could be “because the survey concentrates on a relatively affluent class of people”.
Dr Nick Simpson is chief research officer at the University of Cape Town‘s African Climate and Development Initiative Climate Risk Lab and has led separate research on general public perceptions of climate change in Africa.
He praises the study’s “large, cross-national dataset” and “rigorous statistical techniques”. However, he adds:
“The survey questions focus primarily on mitigation [greenhouse gas emissions prevention and reduction] responsibilities, reflecting a global north bias in climate surveys. [The questions] do not fully capture urgent adaptation concerns or the lived realities of climate vulnerability in low and middle-income countries.”
Future research should incorporate more “adaptation-specific questions” in order to “provide a more holistic understanding of climate action priorities”, he says.
The post Scientists are ‘most trusted’ source of climate information in global-south survey appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Scientists are ‘most trusted’ source of climate information in global-south survey
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)