Public opinion at a tipping point: Germany's path to engaging with climate protection

A follow-up study to Brüggemann et al. (2017), The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public Abstract Heat waves occurring around the world, outspoken warnings from scientists, international climate ac-tivism, and ensuing political debates on climate protection have ensured that climate change has finally caught the public’s attention. This comparative analysis of public opinion during three UN climate sum-mits illustrates the awakening of public awareness of and an increased willingness to actively engage with climate change, probably as the cumulative effect of this combination of events. Comparing cli-mate change awareness, communicative engagement, knowledge, attitudes, and climate-friendly be-haviour during the 2015 (n = 1,477), 2018 (n = 1,044) and 2019 (n = 1,000) UN climate summits, we find major and consistently positive changes in various forms of active engagement with the issue. These results indicate that the appeasement effect observed in an earlier study during the 2015 Paris summit is over: the German public is now ready to take decisive steps to tackle the climate problem. Note for version 2: In the original version, one of the tables showed values with a wrong signedness