Marble Arch, Park Lane, London. Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash.
"Eight in ten (80 percent) of people globally called on schools in their country to teach more about climate change, while just 6 percent of people globally said schools should teach less about climate change," according (PDF, p. 14) to a new survey from the United Nations Development Programme.
Respondents were asked "Should schools in your country do more or less to teach about climate change?" and selected among "more," "about the same as now," and "less." The United States was among the countries with the smallest proportion of respondents, 66 percent, preferring "more" and the largest proportion of respondents, 29 percent, preferring "less."
In general, the report observed, "The proportion of those who wanted more climate education was higher in LDCs [least developed countries] (93 percent) than in other countries. Support in those poorer countries was much higher than in the two richest regions of the world: Northern America [Canada and the United States] (66 percent) and Western Europe (73 percent)."
The survey was conducted by the University of Oxford and GeoPoll with over 73,000 people speaking 87 different countries across 77 countries, mainly by random digit dialing of mobile telephone numbers, in 2023 and 2024. Country-level estimates have margins of error no larger than +/- 3 percentage points.
