Americans Doubt Countries Will Do Enough to Tame Climate Change

Climate change is in the background this US election year as high prices, conflict in the Middle East, AI and other issues take center stage. But that doesn’t mean the public has forgotten about it.

More than half of Americans regard climate change as a very or moderately big problem, and only a quarter of them think the world is equipped to address the challenge, according to new survey results from the Pew Research Center.

Since the group’s previous poll on the topic in 2022, storms, heat and wildfires worsened by greenhouse gas pollution have continued to damage communities and take lives. Biden-era and older policies to boost clean technology and lower emissions have been reversed quickly in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Democrats and people who lean to the left have moved toward pessimism: 69% of them said the US and other countries will not do enough to address risks — an 18-percentage-point leap in four years. Overall, the share of respondents saying countries won’t avoid the worst impacts of climate change is 62%, up nine percentage points.

Only a fifth of Republicans and right-leaning respondents said climate change is delivering harm to people, and most called it a small problem.

In the decade that Pew has asked how much the federal government should be doing to check global warming, the partisan divide has never been less than 51 points. In the 2026 poll, which surveyed 3,524 adults in mid-March, 87% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans supported more US climate policy.

There’s also an age split on the right, with nearly half of right-leaning respondents under 30 saying the US is doing too little. That figure is 21% among Republicans older than 50, consistent with previous results.

Only 12% percent of respondents said they see no evidence that the Earth is heating up. Nearly half, or 48%, said fossil-fuel burning and other human activities cause the warming. Those figures have also been stable for about a decade.

Education correlates with climate change beliefs only on the left. Democrats with graduate degrees said human activity is causing global warming at a rate of 90%. That number falls to 63% for Democrats with a high-school education or less. About 20% of Republicans said humanity causes climate change, across all educational levels.

Among those respondents who said warming is already hurting people, more than two-thirds agreed that big companies — especially the energy industry — and the federal government are positioned to address the problem. Just a fifth said they expected that new technologies will have solved the problem in three decades.