As Europe has been struggling with several heatwaves this summer, a new survey from Summer 2024 reveals how much its citizens are willing to support different kinds of climate policies (n=19,328, 24 June–27 August 2024). As expected, Europeans strongly prefer policies which allocate subsidies for rail transport or home insulation for instance, while they strongly oppose the ones which foresee any kind of tax on polluting behaviours, such as the one on cars and meat.

This new survey highlights interesting trends in Europeans citizens’ preferences and opinions about different possible climate policies currently under discussion. These results are now browsable in an online tool which allows the user to analyse and compare opinions about a set of different climate policies in Europe.

A study by Professor Diego Garzia at the University of Lausanne, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, finds that voters in many Western democracies are now driven more by hostility toward opponents than by support for their own party. Analyzing 143 elections across 12 countries from 1961–2022 using “feeling thermometers,” the research shows that out-party hate is growing faster than in-party love, marking a shift toward negative, rejection-driven politics. This trend fuels polarization, hardens public discourse, and threatens democratic compromise.

A research team has developed a novel high-throughput phenotyping platform, the Multispectral Automated Dynamic Imager (MADI), to monitor plant growth and stress in real time.