The people in Turkey see themselves most threatened by climate change.

In a study that looked at attitudes in 17 countries, 75 percent of citizens rated the risk as great or very great.

Even if the representative survey of 17,000 participants by the Kantar opinion research institute on behalf of the Vodafone Foundation does not have any comparative values, there is a connection in the case of Turkey with the forest fires that struck the country in the months before the survey period from late September to early October .

Timo Steppat

Editor in politics.

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In other countries, too, it can be seen that the threat posed by climate change is perceived as significantly greater when a natural disaster has occurred - regardless of whether it can be attributed to climate change. The authors of the study attribute the fact that Sweden has the lowest risk perception value in Europe because the country has so far been little affected by extreme weather events. Where the climate strike began, only 51 percent of respondents consider climate change a major threat, almost as little as in the United States (50 percent). In Germany, especially older respondents over 65 years of age see a high or very high risk in climate change (28 percent), followed by young people under 24 (27 percent). 66 percent of Germans see climate change as a serious threat.

Only five percent of those questioned see no danger

The study, which was submitted to the FAZ in advance, comes to the conclusion that there is a very high risk perception of climate change worldwide. Globally, only five percent of those surveyed in the 17 countries see no danger in global warming. For the survey, representative surveys were carried out in industrialized countries such as Germany, Italy, Romania or the United States, as well as in developing and emerging countries such as India, China, Kenya and Brazil, which in the study are listed as the global south on the basis of OECD data . The perceived threat from global warming is more pronounced in these countries than in industrialized countries. In addition, there is more evidence in the global south than in the north of paying more money for sustainable products.In countries like India in particular, digitization is seen as an important means of combating this.

According to the study, countries like China and India have the greatest confidence in their own governments that they are willing to fight climate change (93 and 85 percent); There is a similarly high degree of conviction that the respective states are capable of doing this. At least in the case of China, this is likely to have something to do with a heavily censored media public. Although China made a formal commitment to more climate protection with the United States at the World Climate Conference in Glasgow in November, the country nevertheless fought alongside India for the continued use of coal energy. In China and India, followed by Kenya, Brazil and Turkey, the highest level of approval for further state regulations in favor of more climate protection can be ascertained.

In the majority of the countries in the global south that were taken into account, companies and civil societies are only given little importance when it comes to reducing CO2.

In democratic industrialized countries, the respondents also see companies as having an obligation.

In Germany this is indicated by 52 percent of those surveyed.

A third of Germans consider further regulations in favor of more climate protection to be unavoidable, another 39 percent consider them likely.

The United States has the lowest proportion of citizens who feel that more government intervention is inevitable, at 62 percent, is the lowest in the world.