there is no correlation between the level of concern for the environment and the political priority attributed to this issue, underlines François Gemenne

Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC, president of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Nature and Man and member of the IPCC.

We often hear this idea according to which people must be directly affected by the impacts of climate change to become aware of the danger and act, but François Gemenne questions the educational virtues of the catastrophe.

Firstly because there would ultimately be something quite perverse and despairing, on a moral level, in saying that people would only be able to act if they themselves were directly affected by the impacts. of climate change. But beyond these moral considerations, the problem is that in reality, it does not work: we now have several research studies and opinion polls which show that the inclination to act in the face of climate change does not is not necessarily correlated with the level of exposure to disasters.

franceinfo: You mean that people who were affected by the floods in Pas-de-Calais this winter, or those who lost everything in the fires of summer 2022, are not necessarily more inclined to act against the climate change than others ?

Not necessarily. When I was doing my thesis in New Orleans in 2007, a city that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I was struck by the fact that Louisiana voters, despite the trauma of the hurricane, had elected a few months later Bobby Jindal as governor. Bobby Jindal, if you don’t know him, is a notorious climate skeptic, alongside whom Donald Trump would fit perfectly at the IPCC.

There was this idea that attributing the hurricane to climate change was somehow blaming the victims for their own situation. However, the victims needed to be able to name culprits, and the populist and Poujadist logic of Bobby Jindal pointed them out on a platter.

When we look at opinion polls, beyond this election in Louisiana, we do not observe a correlation between the level of concern for the environment and the level of political priority assigned to this issue. This is one of the lessons of a fascinating survey last fall by Ipsos, at the request of EDF, in 29 countries around the world. Overall, around the world, 7 out of 10 citizens say they are very concerned about the state of the environment, and it is generally the climate that is the most cited concern among environmental problems. However, it is not necessarily in the countries where people say they are most worried about the environment that they will consider that ecology is a political priority – and conversely, people will consider that it is a political priority even though it is not always where they are most worried. For example, it is in China that citizens most believe that ecology must be a political priority, although they are not the most worried.

And in France ? Do the French consider the environment as a political priority?

France is one of the countries where people consider this to be a priority, yes. But France is not one of the most worried countries – unlike Turkey, where the Turks do not consider this to be a political priority. There are other emergencies to resolve… It is only in India where the level of priority is correlated with the level of concern, which is very strong in both cases.

“We make a mistake in imagining that our desire to act, or the priority we will give to ecology, depends on our level of knowledge or awareness of the problem.”

François Gemenne

on franceinfo

All the polls are clear: the level of concern about climate change is very high in all countries in the world, and it increases as temperatures rise, in particular because people feel the effects of climate change in their daily. But they also know that the impacts of climate change that they will experience personally are not directly correlated to their personal level of emissions, there is a lag in time and space. And we act above all according to our immediate interests.

There is one more element to consider here: our capacity to forget. In the survey I just talked about, the drought of summer 2022 was only mentioned by one in two French people, when they were asked in 2023 if they had been affected by a drought in recent years. We must therefore not count on disasters to make us take action. And ultimately it’s good news, because it would be a little hopeless to rely on that.