The Australia Institute’s annual Climate of the Nation report details changing attitudes and beliefs around climate change, including its causes, impacts and solutions.

The 2020 report shows more Australians believe climate change is occurring and that humans are the main cause than since 2012. Australians support a range of decarbonisation policies and increasingly want Australia to be a world leader in finding solutions to climate change.

Key findings:

• After the devastating Black Summer bushfires, eight in ten Australians (82%) are concerned that climate change will result in more bushfires, up from 76% in 2019
• Vast majority of Australians (83%) want coal-fired power stations to be phased out 
• Only 12% of Australians prefer investment in gas to power Australia’s economic recovery, while the majority of Australians (59%) prefer investment in renewables as a pathway for economic recovery
• Australians overestimate gas industry employment by a factor of 40x, believing, on average, that 8.2% of the workforce is in fossil gas mining when the reality is it represents just 0.2% of the Australian workforce
• Seven in ten Australians (71%) want Australia to be a global leader in finding solutions to climate change, a jump of 9 percentage points from 2019
• More than two in three Australians (68%) believe Australia should have a national target for net-zero emissions by 2050, including majority support across Coalition voters (59%), Labor voters (81%), Greens voters (90%), Other voters (65%).