More Chinese than Europeans identify themselves as environmentalists with a greater sense of urgency

[pampango]

Understandably.

Survey finds Chinese environmentalists more socially conservative than liberal American and European counterparts


Police officers stand guard as residents protest against a planned refinery
which produces the chemical paraxylene (PX), at a square in Kunming, Yunnan province.

But in China, the world's biggest polluter, some 64% of Chinese identify themselves as environmentalists, more than double that of Europe and the US, a report published on Wednesday by Dutch research agency Motivaction finds.

Not only are many more people in China describing themselves as environmentalists, they also have a very different profile from climate champions in the west. The report finds they tend to be socially conservative, devoted to family and traditional Asian values, and pro-business groups who believe strongly in the role of technology to solve the world's problems. In contrast, the US and Europe have developed a "cosmopolitan environmentalism", a movement supported frequently by liberal, highly-educated and politically active groups.

The Chinese environmentalists have a much greater sense of urgency as they experience, for example, the choking pollution of Beijing, and the new report concludes environmental organizations need to understand how to harness their potential.

There is still a big challenge to persuade China to sign up to a new global deal on tackling climate change, hoped for at a UN summit in 2015. European environmentalists have tended to see the Chinese government as a roadblock to an international climate deal.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/07/more-chinese-than-europeans-identify-themselves-as-environmentalists

China signing on to any 2015 global environmental agreement is indeed a 'big challenge'. Getting the US to sign on to it will be just as big a challenge. It's hard to imagine any international agreement on anything (particularly a 'liberal' issue like the environment&quot getting through republicans in the senate which never ratified Kyoto.

[mindwalker_i]

1. The effects of pollution are very visible there

It probably raises awareness. Here, i almost seems as if we have taken care of the most visible aspects of pollution while leaving a lot of the causes to continue out-of-sight.