Green China

Most Chinese very aware of green issues: China Daily-EDF survey

By Li Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-18 07:42

A majority of Chinese people have a high degree of awareness about climate change and are willing to mitigate their carbon emissions as a possible solution for global warming, according to a bilingual survey jointly conducted by China Daily and Environment Defense Fund (EDF).

More than 90 percent people who took the survey said they are somewhat or very concerned with the global warming issue and a majority of them agree that carbon emissions generated from humans activities are causing the problem, the survey finds.

When it comes to their own daily life, more than three-quarters of people are willing to take actions themselves, such as saving water, electricity and fossil fuels in their daily life to go low-carbon, though they admit the difficulties in achieving it.

And they prefer simple approaches such as planting trees to offset their carbon emissions, rather than the more sophisticated and sometimes controversial methods such as buying carbon credits from other countries' emission reduction efforts.

Only about 50 percent of the people are hopeful that an international agreement will be achieved at the ongoing UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which entering its final day today.

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Some interesting results also come out from the unique "bilingual language" feature of the China Daily poll: On the same questions, people who respond in English are overall more optimistic and care more about climate change issues than people who responded to the Chinese version.

For instance, while 79 percent of the English-speaking respondents are willing to offset their carbon footprints, only 64 percent Chinese counterparts said the same.

Similarly, more than 54 percent of people who took the English survey believe the international community will reach common ground in the Copenhagen climate talks, but only 46 percent Chinese survey respondents agreed.

"This could be a self-selected bias as China Daily English readers tend to include more intellectuals and also people who are more exposed to the internationally popular topics," an analyst of the survey from US based EDF said.

And this may arouse some concerns, he said.

"If the climate change issue only stays at the elites level and does not penetrate to the grassroots, it is hard to envision that a real 'common but differentiated' solution would be reached that can transcend culture, wealth, and level of education," the analyst said.

More than 1,000 people joined the online survey at China Daily website between December 7 to 16.