Public concern over environmental issues

Environmental awareness and concern have grown in the UK in recent years on the back of several successful mass-media environmental campaigns that have spread awareness of environmental issues threatening the nation's ecosystem. Meanwhile, the UK government has placed environmental preservation at the forefront of current policy, making the general public more conscious of how their consumption habits, energy use, and so forth affect the domestic environment. The proportion of people identifying pollution and environmental issues as the most, or among the most, significant issues facing Britain has increased by 3.6 percentage points in the five years to 2023-24, reaching 14%.

However, any would-be exponential growth in this proportion has been limited by alternative economic and socio-economic concerns which have taken precedence in the minds of the UK public, e.g. the UK's economic sustainability, the efficiency of the National Health Service, immigration policy and more recently the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and security concerns surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, having been exposed to mass-media environmental campaigns and subject to environmental policy reform in recent years, the proportion of people considering ecological preservation as one of many essential societal issues has remained upward. In particular, self-reported behaviours on specific environmental actions (e.g., recycling, renewable energy use in households, and limiting the use of fossil-fuel vehicles) have increased as more eco-friendly methods have become more manageable. Indicative of this, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reported the UK recycling rate for waste from households stood at 44% in 2020, compared to 40.4% in 2010. However, this fell short of an EU target stipulating the UK market was to recycle at least 50% of household waste by the end of 2020.

In 2021-22, the proportion of adults in Great Britain identifying pollution and environmental concerns as the most prominent domestic market issues almost doubled to 20.4%. Several factors are expected to contribute to this sudden rise. In 2020-21, environmental concern fell as the public focus shifted to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, in 2021-22, some controversial protests campaigns by environmental groups, including Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, have had massive national coverage, which undoubtedly has increased awareness of environmental concerns. Additionally, in Autumn 2021, Glasgow hosted the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, which brought more national media coverage of the global effects of climate change and international efforts to fight it. As a result of the conference, in November 2021, the number of people in the Ipsos MORI's Issues Index identifying climate change as a primary issue rose to 40%. However, the conference's long-term effects have been substantially weaker, with only 13% identifying climate change in May 2022. As a result, environmental awareness declined by 7.7 percentage points in 2022-23.