Public Support for International Climate Action: September 2021

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Summary: The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) will take place in Glasgow Scotland (UK) beginning on October 31, 2021. The two-week conference “will bring [nearly all the countries in the world] together to accelerate action towards the goals of the [2015] Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

As context for the conference, this report describes how registered voters in the United States view a variety of policies related to international climate action. This survey was fielded from September 10 – 20, 2021, drawing on a representative sample of the U.S. population (n = 1,006; including the 898 registered voters whose data are included in this report). This report is a follow-up to our March 2021 report, which included most of the same survey items as the current report, and was released just prior to President Biden’s Earth-Day Leaders Summit on Climate. This executive summary reports the results from all registered voters, while the report breaks the results down by political party and ideology.

• 66% of registered voters think the United States should be doing more to address global warming.
• 66% think the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do, an increase of 5 percentage points since our survey in March 2021.
• 73% support the U.S. government’s pledge to reduce the nation’s carbon pollution by 50% by the year 2030.
• 66% support providing financial aid and technical support to developing countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions (+8 percentage points since March 2021)
• 61% support providing financial aid and technical support to developing countries to help them prepare for the impacts of global warming (+6 percentage points).
• 78% support the United States pressuring other countries to reduce their carbon pollution.
• 74% think other industrialized countries (such as England, Germany, and Japan) should be doing more to address global warming.
• 81% think developing countries (such as China, India, and Brazil) should be doing more to address global warming.