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By Damian Carrington
30 August 2011 If, like me, you think urgent global action is needed to avert the worst impacts of global warming, then you will also agree that global opinion is crucial: political will is created directly out of public pressure. So a new global survey suggests the glass is two-thirds full. Sixty nine percent of citizens in 51 nations around the world are concerned about climate change, and that two-to-one majority is essentially unchanged over the last four years. But there’s less cheer in the details of the survey, conducted by Nielsen and available here (first link, free registration required). The global climate negotiations, still the only real game in town, are dominated by the US and China. The Nielsen survey finds that less than half of Americans (48%) are concerned about global warming, compared to 51% in 2009 and 62% in 2007. With 14 point fall in 4 years, one can see why Republican climate sceptics feel comfortable rejecting the idea that every nation on earth (including their own) has accepted: that human activities are causing climate change and that the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions is pressing. More surprisingly perhaps, opinion in China is also on the slide. Concern fell from 77% in 2009 to 64% in 2011, putting it back nearer to 2007’s figure of 60%. The Guardian’s Asia environment correspondent, Jonathan Watts, tells me from Beijing that public awareness of environmental issues was rising until 2009, albeit from a very low base. “Local issues such as pollution were foremost, but in 2008 and 2009 climate change rose up the political and media agenda ahead of the Copenhagen summit” attended by 120 world leaders, he says. But it has since slipped and Watts says Chinese journalists are finding it harder to interest their editors in the climate change issue. But turning to two other big beasts at the climate talks, the opposite trend is seen. In India, concern about global warming is at 86%, up from 80% in 2007, and concern in Europe has risen from 58% to 68% since 2009. The most concerned region of the world is Latin America (90%), followed by the combined Middle East-Africa region used by Nielsen, where concern has gone up 11% to 80% in two years. I think the Latin American case is instructive. “Latin America has experienced a number of distressing and impactful environmental events over the last several years, and the region’s consumers are increasingly attributing these events to broad climate change,” says Arturo García, president at Nielsen Latin America. “People are expressing clear concern about unusual weather patterns including increased rainfall, hurricanes, and floods in some parts of Latin America, and severe droughts in others.” […]

Climate change concern tumbles in US and China