Publics see warming as urgent, govts as failing

A poll of 19 nations released here Wednesday reveals that majorities in most countries believe climate change should be a high priority for their governments, but relatively few thought that their leaders were doing enough about the problem. The poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, found that publics in 16 of the countries surveyed want their governments to focus more attention on climate change. Only four, however, thought their governments agreed. Those who want their governments to prioritise climate change include respondents in the some of the largest greenhouse gas emitters - China, the U.S. and Russia. The poll results come just five months ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is to set the framework for a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. According to PIPA, an overall average of 60 percent of the nearly 19,000 respondents interviewed for the survey want climate change to become a higher priority for their governments than it is. The survey was conducted from April to early July.