US, China least concerned about climate change

“Americans and Chinese, whose economies are responsible for the greatest annual CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions, are among the least concerned”, the Pew Research Center’s poll said on Thursday.

Center Director Tom Karl said he agreed with that.

“We are on the right track to achieve an ambitious universal and legally binding agreement”, he said.

“The agreement must send a clear signal to the private sector that the low-carbon transformation of the global economy is inevitable, beneficial, and already under way”, said Ban.

Countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), including Argentina, had to file a plan to tackle emissions, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC).

The poll was conducted in person and by telephone with 45,435 people from March through May.

“As the science of event attribution continues to advance, so too will our ability to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events”, he said.

As a solution, Elver stressed that countries must focus their food production from industrial agriculture to more transformative systems. “Else, we might well be looking at a future of run-away global warming and disastrous impacts of extreme weather events on the poor and vulnerable of the world”, Bhushan says, adding that there would be a 25 percent “ambition gap” until 2030.

Among the major polluters, 58 per cent of the Russians say that any effort to combat climate change is principally the responsibility of the wealthier nations, as do 56 per cent of the Chinese. South Korea and Japan, the two most developed Asian states in the sample, voice full-throated support for emissions limits with 89 percent and 83 percent in support respectively.

But such broad support masks significant partisan differences in a few key countries that may complicate implementation of any climate accord. This compares with 57% of Liberals.

“It’s a very good step but it is not enough”, UN Climate Change Secretariat Christiana Figures said during a presentation of the report in Bonn. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, followers of the Conservative Party (39%) are far less anxious than backers of the Labour Party (49%). It also found that the collective impact of the INDCs will lead to a decrease in per-capita emissions over the coming 15 years. The results are being released as nations head for Paris to broker a CO2-reduction treaty.

Climate change inequality can only be solved if countries place long-term worldwide cooperation at the forefront of their agendas, and actively seek common ground on how to share the cost burden of mitigating to and adapting to climate change, rather than focusing on addressing their own countries’ short-term economic interests.