Climate change important to North Carolinians at state, national and global level

A series of polls by High Point University’s Survey Research Center finds that climate change is a concern among North Carolina residents at a state, federal and global level.

High Point researchers have asked North Carolinians about the importance of climate change going back to December 2022. 

Its most recent poll, released this month, found that 43 percent of respondents said it was a “very important” issue for policymakers in Washington to deal with. 

That ranked just behind abortion and higher than the number of people who considered the war between Israel and Hamas, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine to be very important.

The climate change figure was similar when people were asked to think about it on a scale of global and statewide issues, says political scientist Martin Kifer of High Point University, the poll’s director.

“It's relatively consistent, in terms of people saying, ‘Oh, it's important for this level of government to deal with,’" he says. "There's a relatively steady stream of information about climate change, just like some of these other issues. And people are taking that into account when they assign importance to it as an issue.”

Kifer noted that pocketbook issues like inflation and gas prices and security concerns such as school safety consistently rank higher than climate change.