Concern about climate change is near its highest point in the United States, new polling shows. The American polling company Gallup released its annual environment poll on April 14. Conducted last month, the survey provides new insights on how Americans are viewing climate change.
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Currently, 44% of U.S. adults worry a great deal about global warming or climate change, among the highest recorded since 1989—along with 46% measured in 2020 and 45% in 2017. A record low 35% of adults in the U.S. would say they feel positively about the quality of the environment—a decline that has been driven by Independents, whose view has fallen 10 points since last year from 44% to 34%. That’s compared to 63% of Republicans’ rating the quality of the country’s environment as high, and 16% of Democrats, the lowest on record for the group by one point. The drop in confidence “is a pretty big swing, especially since we did not see a change in administration this year,” says Gallup Senior Editor Megan Brenan.
The drop in satisfaction from Independent voters is appearing across a number of issues, Brenan notes. “A lot of different topics that we cover have also seen similar drops among Independents in the last year or two,” she says. “I think it's somewhat emblematic of the popularity of the President and how well people perceive the job that he's doing.”
Do Americans want the government to do more to tackle climate change?
The Trump Administration has embraced climate denialism and pursued a number of anti-climate actions since taking office in January 2025. This past February, the EPA repealed the endangerment finding, the landmark assessment that proved six greenhouse gasses were a threat to human health thus making the legal case for climate policies and regulation. That same month, the EPA also announced that it would roll back Biden-era pollution standards, meant to be implemented by 2027, allowing coal-burning plants to release more heavy metals, like mercury and lead.
A growing number of people, however, believe that the U.S. government could be doing more when it comes to environmental action, the polling shows. Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults say the government is doing too little— the highest level recorded since Gallup’s initial reading in 1992, and a six-point increase from last year.
Is climate change impacting Americans’ lives?
Though a near-record high number of Americans (66%) say they feel the environment is worsening—and a strong number of U.S. adults believe the effects of global warming have already begun (61%)—less than half, 45% of those surveyed, believe the effects of climate change will pose a threat to them or their way of life during their lifetime.
But despite this finding, around the country the impacts of global warming are already being felt.
The U.S. just experienced its warmest March on record, with the average temperature in the contiguous United States 9.4°F above the 20th-century average. And many of the natural disasters seen in the last year have been supercharged by our warming planet. Climate change increased the likelihood of the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles last January, while so-called “100 year floods” like the one that killed more than 100 people in Texas’s Hill Country last July, are becoming more and more common as the world warms.
What environmental issue do most Americans care about?
The biggest environmental issue of concern for respondents was the pollution of drinking water (according to 56% of those surveyed) and the maintenance of the nation's supply of fresh water (53%); 38% of Republicans said they worry “a great deal” about pollution of drinking water, and 31% said they cared about the maintenance of the nation's supply of fresh water—compared to only 6% of Republicans who feel the same about climate change. This comes as the Colorado River, which supplies water to Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, faces historic water scarcity and a battle over water rights. Record dry conditions are also raising fears of drought in parts of North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.
Over time, beliefs about the cause of global warming have diverged greatly by political party, polling shows. In 2001, 72% of Democrats, 59% of Independents, and 52% of Republicans attributed global warming to pollution from human activities. Now, 90% of Democrats, 65% of independents and just 28% of Republicans say this.
It highlights how, for many Americans, climate change has persistently been politicized, viewed as a partisan issue rather than one grounded in science. “Since 2001 when we started asking, we've seen these similar patterns among partisans,” says Brenan. “It is definitely very, very polarized.”