The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Niels Mede, whose interest is in public trust in climate scientists; his paper builds on data from a global survey on trust in science, including climate science. Overall, trust in science is actually quite solid, but is also turning increasingly polarised in parts of the population; climate science is a particular battlefield here.
What people, and what publics, are divided about climate science, then? Divisions largely follow partisan ideological lines; elite cues and identity sustain that divide, and fuel this division. Trust in climate scientists is moderately high worldwide, and is lower than trust in science overall; in western countries, it is usually correlated with ideology.
However, while such average trust levels are well known, then, the specific cleavages between the sides are less known, and much of the focus to date has been on the west; the present study sought to explore this more widely, across 68 countries, through the Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism (TISP) project. The TISP dataset is now publicly available.
Niels’s focus here is on the survey question ‘how much do you trust climate scientists?’ A solid majority of respondents have at least some trust; only 18% of respondents do not trust them. This is unevenly distributed around the world, though; more politically divided countries also tended to have less trust in climate scientists.
Religious belief tends to increase such trust; political orientation (as right-wing or conservative) and science-related populist attitudes tended to be negatively correlated. Social media use did not have a strong effect, while news media use and conversations with peers had some positive effects. Education, income, and urban residence had very minor effects.
Such patterns held across many of the countries: news media use and conversations with peers were important in some 40 countries, as were populist views of science. Age had diverging effects depending on the country; effects of religion also depended on the religion: Muslim-majority countries often showed higher trust amongst religious respondents, while the opposite was true in Israel. Similarly, left-right divides in trust were more pronounced in more affluent countries. Demographic cleavages generally also seemed to affect trust in any scientists in the same way they affected trust in climate scientists; however, the left-right divide was much more pronounced for climate science than other forms of science.
All of this has many further implications, not least also with respect to the role of news media and social media; it also means that depolarisation strategies need to be tailored to individual nations.
