Good environmental standard doesn’t equal climate confidence

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) has performed a large survey among common people (9000 respondents in 9 countries on 4 continents) in collaboration with The Climate group, Earthwatch, The Smithsonian and WWF in order to create a climate confidence index. The survey covers four areas; peoples concern in climate change, the confidence in solving the problem with climate change, the commitment to reduce climate change and finally the optimism in solving the issue with changing climate. When combining the result from HSBC’s survey with the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) from Yale University we found some really interesting aspects.

The figure shows concern, confidence, commitment and optimism regarding climate change and EPI in the same diagram. Source: HSBC & Yale University

The figure shows data from HSBC’s survey and EPI plotted on the countries, the darker brown the better result in EPI and customer confidence index in a decreasing scale.

When comparing two developed countries (United Kingdom and Germany) with two emerging countries (China and India) in terms of EPI, climate change concern and climate change commitment, the result is clear; China and India are performing poor EPI but has a large concern about the climate change and in contrast, United Kingdom and Germany is both scoring high EPI but climate change is not bothering them in the same extent as in China and India.

Another key finding from HSBC’s survey is to which extent a customer is willing to go in order of saving the environment.