Publics and UK parliamentarians underestimate the urgency of peaking global greenhouse gas emissions

Kenny, John and Geese, Lucas (2025) Publics and UK parliamentarians underestimate the urgency of peaking global greenhouse gas emissions. Communications Earth & Environment, 6. ISSN 2662-4435

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Abstract

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports treat politicians as recipients of information, but not as foci of research efforts. Moreover, academic research on politicians’ knowledge concentrates on belief in climate change’s anthropogenic cause. Little is known of how aware national parliamentarians are of key findings and policy recommendations from assessment reports. Here, we address this through a survey of 100 Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom on their knowledge of the well-publicised statement from the 6th assessment report of when global greenhouse emissions need to peak for a global temperature increase limit of 1.5 °C to be possible. Parliamentarians overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve although partisan differences apply. Public surveys in Britain as well as Canada, Chile and Germany show similarly low knowledge, yet being younger, worried about climate change, and having lower levels of conspiracy belief mentality increase accuracy significantly.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: The data for the publics’ surveys have been uploaded to Code Ocean. The data underlying the MP survey is taken directly from crosstabulations provided to the authors by Savanta (https://savanta.com/), the data collector. Code availability: The code used for the publics’ survey has been uploaded to Code Ocean. The analyses were carried out using Stata 15.1. Funding information: The work was supported by the European Research Council (via the DeepDCarb Advanced Grant 882601) and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (via the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) ES/S012257/1).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	climate change,climate knowledge,politicians,surveys,public opinion,environmental science (miscellaneous),political science and international relations,sociology and political science,sdg 13 - climate action,4* ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2300/2301
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups:	University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	02 Oct 2025 15:30
Last Modified:	02 Oct 2025 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100596
DOI:	10.1038/s43247-025-02655-w

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