Even though seven in ten say it is likely that the soaring temperatures were caused by climate change

With the country recovering from last week’s heatwave, some might expect the high temperatures to have affected public attitudes towards climate change.

Indeed, the results of a new YouGov study – conducted on 28-29 June, immediately following the heatwave – find that 71% of Britons think it is likely that the recent hot weather was a result of climate change, including 40% who see it as “very likely”.

Yet despite this, the results also show that the heatwave has had little to no impact on climate change attitudes.

For instance, while the results show that 67% of Britons now say they are very or fairly worried about climate change and its effects, this is in line with most of the previous tracker data YouGov has gathered since September 2021, conducted at very different times of year.

Likewise, when asked whether the greater priority is keeping household bills down or reducing carbon emissions, 66% still say the former and 23% the latter – effectively unchanged from when we asked this question in November.

And when it comes to a battery of measures that a) Britons might be willing to personally do in order to help combat climate change or b) support the government doing for the same reason, we again see no movement.

Similarly, separate data on the number of people saying “the environment” is a top issue facing the country has remained stalwart, at 18% this week compared to 16% the week before (and having been between 14-17% all year). This continues to place the environment behind the economy, immigration, defence, health, crime, and welfare as a top issue – and on a par with housing.

What has shifted attitudes when it comes to climate change?

So if the recent heatwave hasn’t shifted the public opinion dial, with Britons already convinced of the reality of climate change and that it is affecting the UK, is there anything that has?

Looking again at our ‘most important issues’ tracker, which has a much greater body of data as it runs weekly and stretches back to 2011, we can see that the most acute shift in the numbers saying ‘environment’ is a top issue was in 2014, during that year’s winter storms and flooding. This saw the number saying the environment was a top issue facing the nation rising from 9% in late January to 23% in mid-February.

However, the Met Office suggested at the time that climate change made only a secondary contribution to the flooding, and it is likely that opinion at the time related to the specific issue of mitigating the floods, rather than the wider issue of climate.

A shift that is very directly climate change-related comes in spring 2019, when Extinction Rebellion dominated headlines with their protests in London. This saw the number of people picking environment as a top issue growing from 17% in mid-April to 27% by late-May. It would not return to these prior levels until 2024.

The run-up to COP-26 in 2021 – which received a great deal of domestic news attention owing to the fact that the UK was hosting – also saw the environment rise on our top issues list, from 30% in mid-October to 40% in early November.

In terms of weather events, it is possible that the UK heatwave in 2022 is behind the increase from 23% in mid-July to 34% by mid-August. While the next year’s summer rise does not correlate with UK temperature spikes – with the peak of 33% in late July taking place in between the two hottest periods in June and September – it may be connected to broader impacts on the continent including wildfires and holiday disruption.

However, in 2024 and 2025 there was no discernible increase in concern about the environment during hot period, and there are other major climate-related events that are undetectable within the tracker data, including, for instance, COP27 and subsequent summits, the US withdrawing from the Paris agreement, and news that Earth has passed the 1.5C target limit above pre-industrial levels.

It is of course worth noting that many of these increases in belief that the environment is a top issue are temporary, with figures subsequently receding once the subject comes out of the news.

See the full results here

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