What the evidence shows

The UNDP Peoples' Climate Vote 2024 is the world's largest standalone public-opinion survey on climate change, designed to give policymakers a direct read on what citizens think and want ahead of the 2025 round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. It asked 15 questions covering how climate change affects people's daily lives and decisions, how well they think governments, businesses, and other actors are addressing it, and what actions they want to see going forward.

The survey's defining feature is its reach into populations rarely captured by opinion research: it deliberately oversampled Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and over 10% of respondents (9,321 people) had never attended school, including 1,241 women over 60. Nine of the 77 countries surveyed had never been asked about climate change in a survey before. Results are organized into four sections: The Peoples' Perspective (lived experience), The Peoples' Stocktake (perceptions of current action), The Peoples' Priorities (desired policies), and The Peoples' Call for Collaboration (international cooperation).

Because of its scale and the involvement of University of Oxford statisticians in weighting and validation, this report functions less as a single "finding" and more as a reference dataset — a way to check whether a specific advocacy claim about public opinion ("people want X") is actually supported by cross-national evidence, and at what magnitude.

Key Findings

• Broad, near-universal demand for stronger commitments. 80% of people globally want their country to strengthen its climate commitments, including majorities in all 20 of the world's largest GHG-emitting countries surveyed.

• Support for fast fossil fuel transition, including in producer countries. 72% globally want a quick transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, with majority support in 62 countries (85% of countries where the question was asked), including 8 of the 10 biggest oil, gas, and coal producers.

• Climate change already shapes daily decisions. 69% of people globally said climate change affects major life decisions (where to live, work, what to buy), rising to 74% in Least Developed Countries and 80% in Small Island Developing States.

Stand-out data points

• 86%: global majority favoring international climate cooperation over geopolitical rivalry, one of the highest consensus figures in the report.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Credibility One of the largest and most methodologically rigorous public-opinion datasets in the library (73,765 respondents, Oxford-weighted); strong citation for high-credibility claims.

• Solution focus High support for named solutions (72% fossil fuel transition, 81% nature protection) gives evidence that "people already want the solution" framing is accurate, not aspirational.

• Justice A clear strength: LDCs and SIDS were deliberately oversampled, and hard-to-reach groups (no formal education, older rural women) were specifically targeted via quota management. Remaining equity gap: people without phone access are structurally excluded. 

— non exhaustive.

Key quote

"The Peoples’ Climate Vote is loud and clear. Global citizens want their leaders to transcend their differences, to act now and to act boldly to fight the climate crisis."

© UNDP, June 2024 — All rights reserved. 

Last update: 8 July 2026

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