Report reveals public attitudes to climate change

The results of a new study, led by Sustainable Places Professor Nick Pidgeon from the School of Psychology, published a year on from the major winter flooding, show that the British public's belief in the reality of climate change and its human causes rose significantly last year - and is now at its highest since 2005.

The research team also found that many see climate change as contributing at least in part to the winter flooding events.

In December 2013 and January 2014, an exceptional run of winter storms hit the UK, leading to widespread flooding. Although it is very difficult to attribute any single set of weather events to climate change, such extremes of weather are predicted to be more frequent and severe in the UK under a changed climate.

A collaborative research team from Cardiff and the University of Nottingham set out to understand in detail how the British public had responded to the flooding last winter. To do this they surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,002 respondents from across Britain, together with a further group of 995 people drawn from five areas of England and Wales that had been affected by the flooding last winter.

Read more here