By Will Nichols / Source: BusinessGreen

flood

Public acceptance that human activity contributes to climate change rose significantly in the wake of last year’s devastating floods and now stands at its highest level since 2005, researchers have said.

A survey of 1,002 people across the country and 995 from five areas of England and Wales affected by the flooding last winter found 88 per cent of people agree the world’s climate is changing, close to the 91 per cent recorded a decade ago. Just six per cent said they did not think the climate is shifting.

Close to half of survey respondents said climate change is ‘partly caused by natural processes and partly caused by human activity’, while 37 per cent were of the opinion that climate change is mainly or entirely caused by human activity – an increase of around eight percentage points from a similar survey in 2013.

Just 12 per cent of respondents held purely natural processes accountable and one per cent said there is no such thing as climate change.

“The present survey – out of five comparable studies that have
employed this measure since 2010 – has found the highest percentage of individuals who attribute climate change to human causes and the lowest percentage of people attributing climate change to natural causes,” the researchers said.

More than three quarters of respondents said they had personally noticed signs of climate change during their lifetime, with 39 per cent mentioning changing weather patterns or extreme weather, 27 per cent naming heavy rainfall, floods, or rising river levels, and 20 per cent changes to the seasons.

Around 1 in 9 people – 11 per cent – saw climate change as one of the three most important issues facing the UK today, a score comparable to crime, education, or wider environmental problems. Around a third referred to the economy, with one in five mentioning the NHS or health care

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