Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports treat politicians as recipients of information, but not as foci of research efforts. Moreover, academic research on politicians’ knowledge concentrates on belief in climate change’s anthropogenic cause. Little is known of how aware national parliamentarians are of key findings and policy recommendations from assessment reports. Here, we address this through a survey of 100 Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom on their knowledge of the well-publicised statement from the 6th assessment report of when global greenhouse emissions need to peak for a global temperature increase limit of 1.5 °C to be possible. Parliamentarians overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve although partisan differences apply. Public surveys in Britain as well as Canada, Chile and Germany show similarly low knowledge, yet being younger, worried about climate change, and having lower levels of conspiracy belief mentality increase accuracy significantly.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports are a mammoth task, involving 782 authors, 66,000 peer-reviewed articles and almost 200,000 review comments. They aim to provide an authoritative, objective source of information for policymakers on climate change’s causes and effects, as well as to outline pathways for mitigation and adaptation. Their work has been described as “the world’s most influential climate report” and “the equivalent of the King James Bible on climate change”.
As actors with the capacity to affect meaningful change within their countries and beyond, governments, parliamentarians and other policymakers are the primary targets of dissemination. National governments are intertwined into the process itself to assist in their buy-in. Each government has to grant line-by-line approval to the summary for policymakers until it is agreed by consensus, and they agree to accept the reports as definitive.
And yet, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which key messages from their summary reports are comprehended by parliamentarians. This is important given that the reports have been criticised for being overly complex for policymakers or the public to digest, including by policymakers themselves. Academics have also sought to raise attention that IPCC reports “treat politicians as a recipient of research findings, not an important object of detailed study”. And yet the wider literature largely does not generally measure politicians’ climate change attitudes, including their knowledge of IPCC reports. Understanding whether politicians have knowledge of key findings in IPCC reports is vital given that — despite the political consensus that the reports have — governments regularly follow differing if not contradictory policies to those that would be consistent with the reports’ findings.
It is only recently that research on climate change and politicians has started to become a focus of peer-reviewed literature. Getting access to politicians is difficult, especially sitting parliamentarians who have strong pressures on their time, and thus the lack of research is understandable. However, the lack of awareness of politicians’ knowledge of the state of climate science is problematic. For although knowledge does not automatically result in policy action as people may not respond to scientific evidence in a linear way, it is an important precursor to taking informed judgments. Empirical evidence demonstrates that knowledge can make a difference to politicians’ decisions on climate change as well as other policy areas.
The limited research that exists on parliamentarians’ climate knowledge mostly examines knowledge of climate change’s human causes. In anglophone countries, this reveals considerable partisan divides. Elsewhere, in a 2010 survey of Peruvian legislators, overall knowledge of ten statements based on the IPCC’s 2007 report (AR4) was poor. While important contributions, from such literature we do not know whether parliamentarians internalise how urgent it is to implement deep and rapid decarbonisation. As one study examining knowledge of local politicians in Sweden (among other groups) has demonstrated, knowledge of climate change’s causes may be greater than that of its current state and future consequences. Some richer information from MPs has been obtained through interviews, but these are not designed to be representative.
Here, we address this gap by examining United Kingdom (UK) Members of Parliament’s (MPs’) knowledge of a key finding of the IPCC’s 6th assessment report: that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 if global average temperature increases are to be kept to 1.5 °C. The question was also asked to a representative sample of the British public. Both surveys were fielded in late 2023. The case and issue selection have particular theoretical and normative value.
On the case, the UK has historically been an international leader on climate change mitigation. Its landmark 2008 Climate Change Act served as the blueprint for many other countries. The UK Parliament was also the first national parliament to declare an environmental and climate emergency in 2019 and it co-hosted the 2021 Glasgow Conference of the Parties. While not negating the political divides that exist on climate policies that have become more prominent in recent years, it is thus a most likely country for parliamentarians to be aware of the key findings from IPCC reports. If they are not, then that suggests that the dissemination of the messages into other parliaments may also be a problem. For comparative purposes, we draw on public surveys undertaken in Canada, Chile and Germany to examine the individual-level drivers of public responses given to the knowledge question.
On the choice of topic, the “global emissions must peak by 2025 to retain a realistic chance for 1.5 degrees” statement was a key communication of the IPCC report directed at publics and policymakers. As such, it received headline attention in Britain and internationally from across the news spectrum, including the Economist, Daily Mail, Guardian, Euronews and the BBC. Thus, MPs — and publics who pay attention to current affairs — should have been exposed to the finding even in the absence of reading the report. From the perspective of the report lead authors, it was something they emphasised as a key takeaway in media interviews. One lead author referred to the finding as “a bit of a bombshell” while another told the BBC News that:
“I think the report tells us that we’ve reached the now-or-never point of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. We have to peak our greenhouse gas emissions before 2025 and after that, reduce them very rapidly”.
On the United Nations news section, it was also something that one of the co-chairs of Working Group III was quoted on as a takeaway message. Thus, it was both a visible message and one that those involved in the report considered important to highlight, with the BBC News indeed referring to it in a headline as a “key finding”.
Moreover, given the limited time period of action, the decisions of these MPs during their period of office (2019-2024) were important to aid in the collective worldwide effort to achieve the goal. The UK, like many other countries, has committed in law to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Yet if MPs are not aware that urgent action needs to be taken much sooner, then that could be one potential explanatory factor for not meeting long-term climate mitigation commitments at the national level see ref. . Our results do demonstrate that knowledge of this particular finding of the IPCC’s to be extremely low, with just under 15% of both MPs and publics providing the correct answer of 2025, and over 30% of each stating 2040 or later.
