Overview

The authors built a dedicated cross-country instrument to measure climate knowledge, trust in information sources, and policy preferences across Chile, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Vietnam.

The result is a dataset with genuine messaging relevance: it tells us not just whether people in these countries say they care about climate change (they overwhelmingly do), but who they trust to tell them about it, what they believe is and isn't true, and which policy frames (co-benefits, revenue use, urgency vs. fatalism) do and don't land.

Key Findings

• Scientists are the most trusted climate information source in 6 of 7 countries. Trust in scientists is also the single strongest predictor of climate knowledge

• Global South respondents answered about 20% fewer questions correctly than a comparable Global North benchmark, but outperformed on attributing climate change to human activity. The gap was largest on long-term physical consequences, not on causes.

• Across all 7 countries, respiratory disease (attributed to air pollution and smoking) ranked #1 among 7 major health problems, suggesting a strong, possibly underused, local co-benefit hook for climate messaging.

Stand out data points

• Health/education, solar subsidies, and clean-energy R&D ranked top-3 uses for carbon tax revenue in all 7 countries.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Actionability: Directly relevant to messages proposing concrete policy asks: carbon-tax-revenue framing tied to health/education, solar subsidies, or clean R&D has broad, cross-country public backing; messages proposing equal rebates or deficit reduction face an uphill credibility climb with general publics in these countries.

• Solution focus: The air-pollution/respiratory-health co-benefit ranks as the #1 health concern in every country surveyed — a strong candidate "solution frame" linking climate action to immediate, locally felt benefits rather than only long-term abstraction.

• Explainability: quantitative, country-specific coefficients with significance levels and openly published replication code support precise, citable claims rather than generic gestures toward "Global South opinion."

  
  

Key quote

"Scientists stand out as the most trusted information source in all countries except Vietnam."

© The Author(s) 2025 — Open Access, licensed under CC BY 4.0 International. Reuse, adaptation, and redistribution are permitted with appropriate credit and a link to the licence.

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