In an international survey of people’s responses to the climate crisis and other pressing issues, the country with the highest percentage of people who say they’re not worried about climate change “at all” turned out to be the United States.
A survey released Monday by Ipsos found that about half of adults (48%) across 31 countries worry at least a fair amount about climate change.
The survey of more than 23,000 adults worldwide, conducted online from mid-February to early March, asked people to what extent they’d worried about climate change in the past few weeks: a great deal, a fair amount, a little, or not at all?
In Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina and Italy, more than two-thirds of respondents said they’d worried about climate change a great deal or a fair amount recently. In China and Russia, fewer than 30% said so. And in the United States, some 38% said they worried at least a fair amount about the climate crisis.
However, 29% of Americans surveyed said they didn’t worry “at all” about climate change — a higher percentage than in any of the 30 other countries.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis, which is very much real, is still ravaging the U.S. and other nations, bringing deadly — and worsening — droughts, fires, extreme heat, storms and floods.
Last year alone, we saw the hottest July ever recorded on the planet (again), the largest single wildfire in California history (again), and devastating hurricanes and flooding along the Gulf of Mexico and the United States’ Eastern Seaboard (again).
In the Ipsos survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans said that government (73%), businesses (73%) and individuals (71%) have a responsibility to reduce fossil fuel emissions to help avert the worst of the climate crisis. Over 60% said we need to act now, or we risk failing future generations (something the United Nations agrees with).
Yet only about a quarter of American respondents believed the government has a clear plan to tackle the climate crisis.