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What climate change? Study finds political parties lack focus on climate issues
The lack of focus on climate issues might hurt political parties and their politicians in seeking the votes of millennials and Gen Zers, which make up a third of registered voters for the 2024 elections.
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A protester shows posters and signs during a protest at the Indian Embassy in Jakarta on Sept. 8, 2023. The protesters demanded countries of the Group of 20 to focus on renewable energy development for developing countries during the G20 Summit in New Delhi. (Antara/Fakhri Hermansyah)
Political parties have yet to prioritize issues of climate change and energy transition on their platforms, while politicians only talk about them in relation to economic policy, a recent study has revealed.
This lack of focus on such issues might be disadvantageous for parties that want to win the votes of young people, who are most concerned about the fate of the Earth, during the upcoming elections.
The study, conducted by clean energy advocacy group Indonesia Cerah Foundation, focused on nine political parties that won seats in the House of Representatives during the 2019 election, by looking at news reports published between January 2019 and March this year and each party’s mission statement or manifesto.
The researchers searched for key words such as “climate change”, “coal phase-out” and “renewable energy” in the news reports to see whether these parties had publicly discussed climate change and energy-transition issues.
After crawling through the documents, Indonesia Cerah found that most political parties had not included climate change or the energy transition on their platforms.
“There are very few party policies on such issues. They only make any comments when reacting to issues surfacing on mainstream media,” the foundation research association Wicaksono Gitawan said in an online discussion recently.
Read also: Voters look for pledges on climate in 2024 poll
