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Climate change
About the author
Ryan Neelam
Ryan Neelam was Director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program at the Lowy Institute. He led the flagship annual Lowy Institute Poll, was project director for the Global Diplomacy Index, and wrote about climate diplomacy and multilateral policy.
In March 2023, during fieldwork for this Poll, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change completed its Sixth Assessment Report, synthesising years of global scientific knowledge on climate change. The landmark report concludes that the world is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming in the near term; adverse impacts and cascading risks will escalate as the planet warms; and the window of opportunity to forestall the worst impacts of climate change is rapidly closing.
In the same month, after fieldwork for this Poll had concluded, the Australian parliament passed a key part of the government’s climate policy, the Safeguard Mechanism Amendment Bill. This followed a federal election last year in which a number of independent candidates were elected on platforms championing stronger action on climate change.
A majority of Australians (56%) continue to say ‘global warming is a serious and pressing problem’ about which ‘we should begin taking steps now, even if this involves significant costs’, slightly down by four points from 2022. Three in ten (32%) say ‘the problem of global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost’. The remainder (11%) believe ‘until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take any steps that would have economic costs’.
There is a significant gap between how younger and older Australians respond to this question. Those aged under 30 are far more likely to see global warming as a serious and pressing problem requiring immediate action (72%), compared to a bare majority (53%) of those aged 30 and older who say the same.
