Climate change and energy in the Indonesian mind

What the evidence shows

Indonesia is a strategically important country for climate communication: it is the world’s fourth most populous nation, one of the top ten global greenhouse gas emitters, home to vast tropical forests and peatlands central to global carbon storage, and the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. 

The survey investigates Indonesians’ climate change awareness and beliefs, perceived risks, support for climate and clean-energy policy, attitudes toward specific energy sources, engagement with the topic socially and personally, and willingness to take action — with a distinctive added focus on energy transition attitudes and the role of Islamic charitable giving (zakat, infaq, sedekah, wakaf) in funding a renewable transition.

The report situates its findings against Indonesia’s political and environmental context: high vulnerability to flooding, drought, and heatwaves; major deforestation and peatland loss; a new national capital being built partly in response to Jakarta’s climate-linked sinking; and an energy sector still heavily reliant on coal even as the government has pledged net-zero emissions by 2060. It also explicitly foregrounds religion, noting that 87% of Indonesians are Muslim and that religious belief strongly shapes daily life and, this report suggests, environmental reasoning.

The core communications finding: most Indonesians know very little about climate change as a named, technical concept, yet strongly believe it is happening, worry about it, and support ambitious climate and energy policies once the concept is briefly explained to them.

Key Findings

• Low self-reported climate literacy, but high belief once explained: 73% of Indonesians say they know only “a little” (53%) or have “never heard of” climate change (21%); yet after being given a short definition, 86% say they believe climate change is happening, and 65% attribute it mainly to human activity.

• Strong worry and near-universal policy support: 83% are worried about climate change (33% “very worried”); 77% want government to do “more” or “much more”; 85% favor Indonesia’s participation in the Paris Agreement; and support exceeds 90% for several concrete measures, including a national climate education program (93%), renewable-energy jobs training (94%), and expanding electricity transmission to reach all of Indonesia (94%).

• A large “attitude-behavior” and “social silence” gap: while 88% say climate change is personally important to them, only 21% hear about it in the media weekly, only 11% hear friends/family discuss it weekly, and very few report having already taken concrete actions (e.g., only 13% have donated to an environmental group, only 3% have signed a petition) — though roughly 4-in-10 to slightly-over-half say they “haven’t done [these things] yet, but might.”

Stand-out data points

• 73% attribute climate change to God’s will, coexisting with 65% who separately say it is caused mostly by human activity — evidence that faith-based and scientific causal framings are not mutually exclusive for most Indonesians, which is highly relevant to message design.

• 76% perceive an injunctive norm (that family/friends want them to act on climate) vs. only 27% who perceive a descriptive norm (that family/friends are actually acting) — a 49-point norm gap that closely parallels the “pluralistic ignorance” pattern documented in the Andre et al. (2024) global willingness-to-contribute study already in the Understories library.

• Broad appetite for an energy transition, but not exclusively: 65% want Indonesia to use more renewable energy in the future, and 79% favor banning new coal plants and closing existing ones — yet 53% also want more fossil fuel use, and only 56% (not an overwhelming majority) say leaving most of Indonesia’s coal in the ground is the best path forward, versus 39% preferring continued coal reliance.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Actionability The large gap between “haven’t done but might” (40–54% across actions) and “have done” (3–13%) suggests messages should prioritize concrete, low-barrier calls to action rather than assuming awareness alone will convert to behavior.

• Clarity The 73%-vs-86% literacy/belief gap suggests messages using the technical term “climate change” alone risk losing an audience that would otherwise agree once the concept is briefly and plainly explained

• Emotional resonance 83% worry and 88% personal importance suggest emotional resonance is already high in Indonesia; messages don’t need to manufacture concern so much as channel existing worry toward action.

• Justice The study centers a large, populous, climate-vulnerable Global South country and stratifies by religion, urban/rural, and other demographics, filling a real gap for organizations whose library otherwise leans on US/European survey data. The religious dimension (Islamic charity mechanisms for climate funding) is a genuinely distinctive, locally grounded finding not replicated elsewhere in most Western climate-comms literature.

• Non-maleficence The “73% attribute climate change to God’s will” finding could be misused either to dismiss religious framing as incompatible with climate action, or conversely to imply fatalism (“if it’s God’s will, no action is needed”) — the report itself does not support either misreading, since religious and human-cause attribution coexist for most respondents.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

On the coal question, the authors note that “the government’s promised transition away from coal remains contested internally”, with energy-security priorities and coal-industry ties in tension with stated decarbonization goals.

© Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2025

Library entry updated: 15 September 2026