Only 20% of the general public respondents answered that mitigation is important, which indicates that more efforts should be made to promote awareness of climate change to the public.
A 2015 Comparative Study of Perception of the Public and Stakeholders to Climate Change Adaptation can be evaluated as the country’s first national awareness survey on adaptation to climate change. The study’s authors evaluated the conceptual recognition of climate change-related terms in order to evaluate the conceptual perception about climate change. The concept of climate change, especially mitigation and adaptation, is not easily understandable to the general public. In this study, the authors use Kyoto Protocol, IPCC, weather change, mitigation/adaptation, greenhouse gas and sea level rise as the terms related to climate change.
The findings from the survey and policy recommendations can be summarized as follows. First, only 20% of the general public respondents answered that mitigation is important, which indicates that more efforts should be made to promote awareness of climate change to the public. Second, the level of awareness of the public in responding to climate change is significantly lower than that of environmental stakeholders. The response rate of the general public perceiving climate change mitigation concept is about three times lower than that of stakeholders and the rate for adaptation was about four times lower. (See Figure 2 below.) These results suggest that it is necessary to diversify and promote information about climate change through public education programs.
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Yunji Jeong and Jongsik Ha, “The Comparative Study of Perception of the Public and Stakeholder to Climate Change Adaptation,” Journal of Climate Change Research Vol. 6, No. 2 (2015).
The following table (Table 1) shows you the demographic composition of their survey respondents.
