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covering climate now
Care About the Climate Crisis? The World Is With You
For years—and especially at this fraught political moment—most coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told—by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse—that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.
That is not what the new research finds.
What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do?
The most recent study, People’s Climate Vote 2024, was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the United Nations launched after the 2015 Paris agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly 4 out of 5 of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly 2 out of 3 people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—which, along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research—has published numerous studies documenting the same point: Most people, in most countries, want stronger action on the climate crisis.
A fascinating additional 89% angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “[I]ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states.
In other words, an overwhelming majority of people want stronger action against climate change. But at least for now, this global climate majority is a silent majority.
Taken together, the new research turns the conventional wisdom about climate opinion on its ear. At a time when many governments and companies are stalling or retreating from rapidly phasing out the fossil fuels that are driving deadly heat, fires, and floods, the fact that more than 8 out of 10 human beings on the planet want their political representatives to preserve a livable future offers a much-needed ray of hope. The question is whether and how that mass sentiment might be translated into effective action.
What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do? How might this majority’s actions—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—change? If the current narrative in news and social media shifted from one of retreat and despair to one of self-confidence and common purpose, would people shift from being passive observers to active shapers of their shared future? If so, what kinds of climate action would they demand from their leaders?
These are the animating questions behind the 89% Project, a yearlong media initiative that launched this week. The journalistic nonprofit we run, Covering Climate Now, has invited newsrooms from around the world to report, independently or together, on the climate majorities found in their communities.
Who are the people who comprise the 89%? Given that support for climate action varies by country—the figure is 74% in the U.S., 80% in India, 90% in Burkina Faso—does support also vary by age, gender, political affiliation, and economic status? What do members of the climate majority want from their political and community leaders? What obstacles are standing in the way?
The week of coverage that started on Tuesday will be followed by months of further reporting that explores additional aspects of public opinion about climate change. If most of the climate majority have no idea they are the majority, do they also not realize that defusing the climate crisis is by no means impossible? Scientists have long said that humanity possesses the tools and knowhow necessary to limit temperature rise to the Paris agreement’s aspirational target of the 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. What has been lacking is the political will to implement those tools and leave fossil fuels behind. The 89% Project will culminate in a second joint week of coverage before the COP30 United Nations climate meeting in Brazil in November.
While it’s impossible to know how many newsrooms will participate in this week’s 89% coverage, early signs are heartening. The Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse news agency have joined as lead partners of the project. Other newsrooms offering coverage include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and Time magazines in the U.S.; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.
We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy. Can that deficit be addressed if the climate majority awakens to its existence? Would people elect different leaders? Buy (or not buy) different products? Would they talk differently to family, friends, and co-workers about what can be done to build a cleaner, safer future?
The first step to answering such questions is to give the silent climate majority a voice. That will happen, finally, this week in news coverage around the world.
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
The 89%: New Media Collaboration Calls Attention to 'Climate Change's Silent Majority'
"If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren't responding to that, that's a deficit in democracy," CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. "Why is that? What's to be done about it? Where do we go from here?"
'A Media Problem'
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada's National Observer, Germany's Deutsche Welle, Italy's Corriere della Sera, Japan's Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don't need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories "focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?" its website explains.
"It's also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can't silo it. We can't get distracted by other things."
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow's emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg's Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright "climate silence" from newsrooms, as well as "both-sidsing" the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of "leaving climate out of stories where it should be." For example, the bulk of coverage of January's catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
"They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that's really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn't true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this," he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a "confluence" of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an "overwhelming majority" of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
"Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem," Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
"It's also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can't silo it. We can't get distracted by other things," he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
"One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn't think they're in the majority," Pope said. "They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That's not true. You're not an outlier. You're just like most people in your community."
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
"Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change."
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is "pluralistic ignorance."
"It basically refers to the fact that most of us don't know what's in other people's heads," he said, whether this is family members, strangers we've just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
"What we see consistently," he continued, "and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change."
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, "'is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves."
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper's authors.
"Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action," the study authors wrote. "The prevailing pessimism regarding others' support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions."
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
"The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue," he said. "Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That's not how they're going to learn about it."
Therefore, he said, CCNow's effort to "really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we're talking about it."
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: "Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren't you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren't you doing this?"
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
"Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this."
However, Pope said, the project did become "more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy."
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale's post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, "This is not what people want."
"It's pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change," he added. "Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this."
While Pope acknowledged that "U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious," about half CCNow's collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
"This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it's a hot-button topic, that it's something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again," he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banning The Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
"I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it's not a fear-based idea," he said. "In fact, it's the opposite. It's like we're all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let's not cower."
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
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