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
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
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
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