The research consultancy’s Societal Shift report finds that concern about the seriousness of climate change has fallen between 2024 and 2025 in all territories surveyed except Japan and France, with some of the biggest declines globally seen in Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
Fewer people now see climate change as a “very serious” issue, partly because politicians and business leaders are communicating about it less, said Chris Coulter, chief executive of GlobeScan. His observation echoes the global retreat from climate action seen this year, driven by high-profile climate policy reversals in the United States.
“The signals that the public are getting [about climate change] are diminishing,” Coulter told Eco-Business, adding that non-government organisations have been ineffective at keeping the climate agenda in the public discourse.
In every country in Asia except for Japan, concern about climate change fell between 2024 and 2025. People in India are most likely in Asia to believe that climate change is a “very serious” problem. Source: GlobeScan
Competing issues such as the war in Gaza, inequality and the cost of living crisis may also have drowned out climate concerns, particularly in the Global North, Coulter suggested. According to the study, Australians people rate the impact of the rising cost of living nearly 30 percentage points higher than climate change, with similar gaps in the United Kingdom and Germany. However, people in climate-vulnerable India and Vietnam show near parity, with the cost of living rated just 1 percentage point higher than climate change.
Among all global issues, the increased cost of living is the most personally felt challenge [click to enlarge]. Climate rated higher than biodiversity loss or water stress. Source: GlobeScan
Declining global concern about climate change could also be the result of “hypernormalisation” – even as the impacts of climate breakdown such as increasing wildfires and catastrophic flooding intensify, Coulter said.
Hypernormalisation is a phenomenon first used to describe people living in Soviet-era Russia, who were able to get on with their lives despite systemic dysfunction.
“People are able to hold on to the urgency and acuteness of climate change for only so long before it becomes habituated – it is part of our species adapting,” Coulter suggested.
The study found that a relatively high proportion of people in the Global South continue to rank climate change as a “very serious” issue, revealing a divide between industrialised and developing economies such as China, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Australia in their perceptions of the gravity of climate breakdown.
This matrix compares how strongly people support a greener future and how much they are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. Markets in the upper right quadrant have higher support for the transition and a higher willingness to sacrifice [click to enlarge]. Source: GlobeScan
People in developing countries are also more inclined to support a shift to a green economy – with Indonesia the most supportive country – and are far more likely to make personal sacrifices to support the transition.
While 55 per cent of Kenyans, 47 per cent of Indians and 46 per cent of Egyptians said they would make personal sacrifices to enable the transition to a greener economy, this figure falls sharply in industrialised markets – to 9 per cent in Germany, 8 per cent in Hong Kong, 7 per cent in South Korea and 3 per cent in Japan.
“There is a general perception that people in Europe and the US are the most engaged with sustainability – when in fact the opposite is true,” said Coulter.
The study emerges a few weeks before the start of the COP30 climate negotiations in Brazil, where financial support for climate-vulnerable countries will be back at the centre of discussions. At the last COP talks, developed countries promised to pay at least US$300 billion per year by 2035 to emerging nations to help them adapt to climate impacts. But the amount was deemed inadequate and the terms for implementing the plan remain uncerain.
