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Climate changeClimate 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.
Despite a fractious Australian political debate on climate change over the past two decades, overall, Australians’ sense of urgency in addressing climate change has remained relatively high since 2018. This aligns with roughly steady threat perceptions of climate change over the same period.
In 2024, a majority of Australians (57%) say ‘global warming is a serious and pressing problem’ about which ‘we should begin taking steps now, even if this involves significant costs’. Three in ten (30%) 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’. Only 12% take the view that ‘until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take any steps that would have economic costs’. All results are steady from 2023.
There remains a significant gap between younger and older Australians on this issue, though the gap has narrowed slightly compared with last year. Almost three-quarters (73%) of Australians aged 18–29 say global warming is a serious and pressing problem, compared with 51% of those aged over 60.
Political leaning is strongly correlated with how Australians answer this question. Seven in ten (71%) of those who lean towards Labor say global warming is a serious and pressing problem, compared to only 29% of those who lean towards the Liberal–National Coalition. Among the latter group, the most prevalent view (48%) is to deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost.
