The effect of climate change in the coming years
Written by Grace Genevieve Stewart-Piercy on 27th June 2025
Global warming is causing people to be most concerned about rising temperatures, in new data from The Office for National Statistics.
Climate change is a point of concern for much of the population, especially with rising temperatures, rising sea levels and droughts becoming more common. Data released by the Office for National Statistics shows how the population expect to be affected by climate change in the next ten years.
Groups of people between the ages of 16 to 29, 30 to 49, 50 to 69 and then over 70s were asked, “In which of the following ways, if any, do you think climate change will affect you in the next in the next 10 years?”. Respondents could select more than one of the choices, too.
Across all of the groups the most common answer given was “affected in any way”, coming in at 83 per cent. This really represents the level of worry people have across the board for the way in which climate change will affect so many aspects of our lives.
Aside from “affected in any way”, “increased temperature” was picked across the age groups as the most common way that people think they’ll be affected. This could be for a variety of reasons, including that there may be more knowledge around the fact that temperatures are rising.
In which of the following ways, if any, do you think climate change will affect you in the next in the next 10 years? – Data collected by the Office for National Statistics
Removing “other”, “don’t know’ and “none of these” from the feedback, the least picked answer for how people expect to be affected by climate change in the next decade, was regarding wildfires. Across the ages, 23 per cent of people said that they thought wildfires would impact them. This is probably low because in the UK although we have had wildfires and have had an increase in wildfires, we don’t think about them in the same way as typically hot, dry places like California, USA or Northern and Eastern parts of Australia. Wildfires have been increasing in frequency in the UK though according to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
