How do Norwegians feel about climate change?
The Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen writes about findings from the Norwegian Citizen Panel regarding how Norwegians feel towards climate change. These findings reveal that sadness is the most common emotion, but in general, we feel little towards climate change.
Main content
Through the Norwegian Citizen Panel survey, researcher Thea Gregersen has investigated how strongly Norwegians feel hope, fear, sadness, anger, and guilt when thinking about climate change. Gregersen is a researcher at NORCE and a member of the Norwegian Citizen Panel's research group on Climate and Environment. Her findings from the summer of 2022 indicate that sadness is the emotion we experience most strongly, while anger and guilt are more rare. However, only 28% of Norwegians experience sadness "strongly" or "very strongly".
Gregersen tells Dagsavisen that our feelings can say something about how we perceive climate change. Sadness may indicate that we perceive climate change as a loss of something we care about, while the lack of anger and guilt may indicate that we are generally less concerned with who is to blame for these climate changes. The fact that we generally experience few emotions concerning climate change may further indicate that we perceive climate change as distant. The rest of the article can be read here.
The findings were first reported in Energi og Klima.