Emphasizing the economic benefits of climate action can help build a wider pool of support for those solutions, without losing the backing of people who are already worried about the climate emergency, according to an international opinion survey released on the eve of the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Although 83% of the more than 7,000 survey respondents said they’d personally experienced a physical effect of climate change in the last two years, and majorities or near-majorities reported financial or emotional harm, “current messaging paralyzes rather than mobilizes,” declare the Santa Monica, California-based Milken Institute and The Harris Poll. Nearly half interpret climate messaging as a threat, 65% “feel anxious about climate solutions”, and 35% can’t visualize what a climate solution would look like in their community.

Meanwhile, large majorities of Generation Z/Millennials in India, the United States, Australia, and Kenya are “creating backup plans” or preparing to relocate in response to environmental crises.

“The premise of this report was that we talk about climate, we all recognize it’s important, but no one acts. No one is moving,” Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at The Harris Poll, told The Energy Mix. “It’s basically about how to get out of the lip service on climate change and into the real world.”

The Milken Institute’s belief, she said, is that “if we bring this more local, more economic focus and talk more about this moment, we can actually make a bigger impact than if we go into a global, abstract climate narrative that hasn’t worked as well.”

Economic Concerns Dominate

That line of thinking led the pollsters to an economic frame. “Connecting climate concerns to economic concerns meets people where their attention already lives,” they write, and “economic framing uniquely reaches climate skeptics while maintaining believer support.”

The report headlines a 23-point gap between economic concerns, at 54%, and climate and environmental issues, at 31%, when respondents were asked to name the issue that “occupies the most mental space” in their lives. Climate and environment ranked fourth, behind cost of living and inflation, health and health care access, and employment and job security.

For climate communicators, that points to an opportunity to “make a bridge between people’s top concern and climate solutions to get into their attention arena, Milken and Harris say.

And yet, more direct climate arguments scored best when the pollsters asked a hypothetical question about local infrastructure upgrades, aiming to get at the messaging that would reach outside the bubble to people who deny the science of climate change. Across the global sample, an economic focus—“invest in modern energy and transportation to attract businesses, create jobs, and reduce costs”—drew more support from climate deniers than any other frame. But it also received far less support from everyone else—just 23%, compared to 44% for a focus on “invest(ing) in renewable energy and sustainable transportation to fight climate change.”

The research also found that 95% of respondents believed climate change is happening today, and the percentage of climate deniers in any national survey maxed out at 11% in Australia, 10% in Germany, and 9% in the United States—raising the question of why pollsters or their clients should concentrate on bringing the farthest fringes of opinion into a climate tent.

“The institutional mistrust is creating what we call small knitting circles,” Rodney responded. “The only way to move, at least in the U.S., is everyone coming back to form trust in their local community first.” Asked whether Canadian opinion researchers’ work on less-committed audiences like “civic nationals” might apply elsewhere, she said there’s probably “more interesting research to be done” to segment a public opinion sample more finely.

“The definitive answer is that crisis messaging doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked for a long time,” Rodney said. “The question is, what else do we try next?”

Building Hope

Across the board, the research indicates that a connection to front-line climate solutions builds hope, with 77% of respondents seeing local action as an opportunity to build better communities and 79% declaring that climate activism “would be more effective with community-level interventions”.

Respondents to the survey, conducted from Sept. 29 to Oct. 10 in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Kenya, South Korea, and the United States, said they were looking for “tangible, immediate solutions they can implement, not abstract global narrative,” Milken and Harris say.

The report cites notable regional differences in perception, with 87 to 96% of the populations in Kenya, India, and Brazil saying they’d experienced the direct physical impacts of climate change, compared to 67 to 74% in the United States, Germany, and Australia. Half to two-thirds of the respondents in the first group considered climate change extremely urgent, while the three wealthier countries “harbour the highest skepticism rates”.

In South Korea, 90% of the respondents said they’d experienced climate impacts, but 65% reported anxiety from climate narratives and only 42% saw climate change itself as extremely urgent.

“German audiences uniquely prioritize security framing over environmental or economic messages, while American and Australian populations respond most strongly to energy cost savings and job creation narratives,” the report states. “The term ‘climate crisis’ actively divides these populations, suggesting that economic benefit framing must precede any climate urgency messaging.”

Across all the regions and cultures represented in the research, “certain approaches resonate globally,” the pollsters write. “Economic benefits open doors everywhere, local solutions consistently outperform global narratives, and protecting children’s futures remains the top motivator across all cultures and geographies.”