‘Ultimately, Everything Will Come Back to Health’ Extreme weather events are causing an existential crisis, experts say.

 ‘Ultimately, Everything Will Come Back to Health’

Extreme weather events are causing an existential crisis, experts say.

Climate change has become impossible to ignore. Is the world ready to do things differently?

Communities around the world are experiencing the direct impact of a warming world. The year 2023 was the hottest on record. One-third of Europe’s river network exceeded the “high” flood threshold, swamping homes and crops. Meanwhile, storms caused record-breaking damage in the U.S. The significant increase of these events has made climate change impossible to ignore — and now the data is showing that people around the world want change.

According to Veolia’s 2024 Barometer of Ecological Transformation survey, 75 percent of people around the world feel climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity.

“When it comes to people’s awareness, the numbers are starting to fit more closely with the urgency of the situation,” says Steffi Bednarek, founder of the Center for Climate, Psychology and Change, an organization dedicated to changing embedded habits of thinking and building resilience. “That’s a good thing, even if that means that people are starting to be more anxious. That anxiety is needed for change. But it’s how we respond to the feeling that’s the real question.”

Veolia first began tracking perceptions of climate change in 2022, with its Barometer of Ecological Transformation. In the second edition of the barometer, published this year, the company surveyed over 29,500 people across 26 countries and five continents, from the U.S. and United Kingdom to China and Brazil.