Dr. Pete Lunn:

I will start by coming back to the literacy question, because we measured it. Earlier this year, my colleague at the ESRI, Shane Timmons, and I published a report using a representative sample of adults in Ireland which quizzed people about what they did and did not know. It is not a perfect international benchmark but Professor Walker is right that we are not atypical. We are pretty typical. We are lucky in having few climate change deniers. Over 90% of the population believes in human-caused climate change.

Only 75% understand that climate change is caused by the release of gases, though. A substantial proportion think it is caused by humans and that we are directly heating the atmosphere through our activity rather than it actually being a greenhouse effect caused by gas. There are, therefore, some basic misconceptions among approximately one quarter of the population about the straightforward mechanism of climate change, if you like.

Then, if we get into more detailed questions, we get into difficulty. Approximately one third of the population does not realise that agriculture is a major emitter in Ireland. That is quite a big gap in our knowledge of what makes us a bit different from the perspective of other countries as a climate change polluter. As for where we run into real trouble, there is a pretty good idea of what the impacts of climate change are going to be and what trouble it will and could cause. People are quite good on that stuff and have absorbed that from the news. What they are not good at is what to do.

We gave people a list of 12 actions that ranged from really high impact, such as eating a plant-based diet and not taking one long-haul flight per year, which will have a big impact on a person's climate footprint, down to things that have almost no impact like not littering. We got people to put those action into categories of high, medium and low impact. They were better than chance, but not much. People could do it. They could tell that a flight, in particular, was problematic but they underestimated the impact of making dietary changes. They overestimated the impact of the things they have been taught since they were small. They overestimated the impact of things like not littering and recycling, which are good for the environment and are behaviours we want people to adopt but they do not have a large climate impact, whereas people were less likely to identify the big things that have a climate impact.

Therefore, the answer to the Senator's climate literacy question, which is also related to the question of how we make young people active, is that we are not bad. We are lucky in not having deniers. When it comes to what to do, however, from all the possible actions a person could take, which is an enormous list and we talked about that earlier, it is really hard for an individual to decide what he or she can do in any meaningful sense given the state of knowledge that people not only have but that they realistically could have.

That brings me to what the Senator asked about young people. We published the report today about young people's attitude to climate change. Overwhelmingly, and interestingly, they are no better than older adults. If anything, they are slightly worse at identifying actions that are effective. This idea that young people know what to do is not true; they do not. They are much more worried about it, however. The general adult population is pretty worried. More than 70% of the adult population is worried. More than 90% of our young people are worried. They are almost all-----