There is no global crisis of trust in science — but there is a real, well-documented gap in who feels invited into it. We think closing that gap, building science-aware societies and citizen scientists, is the logical next step after the climate-communication lesson.
Science Communication: Closing the Same Access Gap That Slowed Climate Action
Science Communication: Closing the Same Access Gap That Slowed Climate Action
Introduction
Weak science communication is not a historical footnote in the climate story — it is still actively shaping climate politics today, giving cover to delay and manufactured controversy long after the underlying science stopped being seriously contested. If there is a single lesson from the last few decades of climate communication, it’s that getting the science right is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. How that science reaches the public, who delivers it, and whether people feel like participants or spectators in the process, turns out to matter enormously.
We think the logical response to that lesson is to go further than “communicate better.” The goal should be to actively build science-aware societies, where people understand roughly how science works — that findings update as evidence accumulates, that uncertainty is a normal feature of honest inquiry rather than a weakness, that consensus is earned rather than declared — and where people see themselves as capable participants, as citizen scientists, rather than as a passive audience for conclusions handed down from elsewhere.
That goal runs into a second, related problem: science itself has a structural access gap. People and regions with higher societal status and income tend to have meaningfully better access to producing science, to being taken seriously within it, and to benefiting from what it produces — a pattern that mirrors who has power and voice in the climate crisis itself. Closing the climate-communication gap and closing the science-access gap are, in practice, the same underlying project. What follows is what the evidence actually says about that access gap, rather than an assumption about its shape.
Testing the Premise: Is There Really a “Crisis of Trust”?
It would be easy — and rhetorically convenient — to reach for “public trust in science has collapsed” as the justification for this work. The best available evidence doesn’t support that framing, and using it anyway would undermine exactly the kind of evidence-based communication we’re arguing for.
The TISP (Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism) study is the most ambitious empirical answer to this question to date: a preregistered survey of 71,922 respondents across 68 countries, covering 79% of the global population, led by Viktoria Cologna and Niels G. Mede with 241 researchers from 179 institutions. Its headline finding: no country surveyed showed low overall trust in scientists. Trust was measured across four dimensions — competence, benevolence, integrity, and openness — with a global mean of 3.62 on a 1–5 scale. A closer look at the study has the regional breakdowns (several of Europe’s largest scientific powerhouses score below the global average) and the sizeable majorities who actively want scientists more involved in public policy debate, not less.
So “no crisis on average” is the honest starting point. But averaged-out trust scores can hide exactly the kind of access problem we’re interested in, and two further findings from the same broader research programme get much closer to it.
Distrust Is Often About Legitimacy, Not Information
The first is conceptual, and it reframes the whole problem. Mede and Schäfer’s earlier work defines science-related populism as a belief in a “morally charged antagonism” between ordinary people and an academic elite that is seen as illegitimately claiming both decision-making authority and truth-speaking authority over scientific questions. This is a distinct phenomenon from political conservatism — it cuts across left-right lines in the TISP data rather than tracking them — and it is one of the strongest cross-national predictors of low trust in the full 68-country dataset.
That finding matters more than it might first appear. If science-related populism, rather than simple information gaps, is driving distrust, then the underlying problem is not that people lack facts — it’s that a meaningful share of people do not feel like legitimate participants in how those facts get produced and interpreted. That is an access and legitimacy problem, not an information deficit, and it cannot be fixed by simply repeating the same conclusions more loudly or more often. It requires addressing who is seen as entitled to speak with authority about science, and who is positioned only as a recipient of conclusions reached elsewhere — which is exactly the access gap this piece opened with.
The Field Itself Is Still Working Out How to Measure This Fairly
The second finding is methodological, and we think it’s just as important to include, even though it’s less flattering to any tidy narrative. A 2026 review by Pfänder, Mede, and Cologna in Current Opinion in Psychology is refreshingly candid about the limits of what global trust-in-science research currently knows. The review points out that different global studies reach opposite conclusions on how income inequality relates to trust in science: the Wellcome Global Monitor found a negative association between income inequality and trust, while the TISP study found the reverse. The authors’ conclusion is not to pick whichever finding fits a preferred story, but to argue that the field needs more harmonized measures and greater conceptual clarity — including reflection on the normative assumptions that currently guide the research — before firm conclusions can be drawn from cross-study comparisons at all.
That caution deserves to be taken seriously: there is no clean, broadly agreed answer yet to exactly how inequality and trust in science interact at a global level. Treating contested findings as settled, in either direction, would be exactly the kind of overconfident, single-number thinking we’re skeptical of elsewhere in our work — including in how physical climate risk gets reduced to a single score. The honest position is that this is an active, unresolved area of research, and that matters for how carefully any communication strategy built on top of it should be designed.
What Follows From Taking This Seriously
Two practical implications follow from treating “science communication” as a legitimacy and access problem rather than a messaging problem to be solved with better framing.
First, if science-related populism — not information gaps — is what predicts distrust, then interventions need to address perceived legitimacy and participation directly, not just accuracy or clarity of explanation. Simply explaining findings more clearly to an audience that already feels shut out of the process that produced them is unlikely to close the gap; it may even reinforce the sense that the audience’s role is to receive, not to participate. This is part of what motivates our interest in Art, Science & Technology Collaboration: bringing scientific work into public, non-institutional spaces as a way of widening who feels entitled to engage with it, rather than relying solely on institutional science communication to do that work from the inside.
Second, science communication has a specific defensive function that connects directly to disinformation research: helping people recognize when the “ordinary people versus academic elite” framing is being deliberately and cynically weaponized as a disinformation tactic, rather than expressed as a legitimate structural critique of who gets heard in scientific institutions. Those two things can look superficially similar and need very different responses — one calls for institutional reform and genuine broadening of participation, the other calls for recognizing manipulation. This is where this topic connects most directly to our work on Disinformation & Inoculation, and most concretely, to applied tools like our climate and political fact-checking collaboration.
What We’re Not Claiming
To be clear: we follow and cite Niels Mede’s and Viktoria Cologna’s published research throughout this piece because it is directly relevant evidence for the thesis we’re building — not because we have a research collaboration or formal partnership with them. If that changes, we will say so explicitly, with specifics.
Conclusion
The evidence does not support a global crisis of trust in science, and we don’t think it’s honest to build a case for better science communication on a premise the data rejects. What the evidence does support is something more specific and, we think, more actionable: trust is polarized rather than collapsed, science-related populism is a real and distinct predictor of that polarization that tracks legitimacy and access rather than information, and the research field studying all of this is itself still working out how to measure these dynamics consistently across very different societies. Taken together, that points toward science communication as fundamentally a question of who feels like a legitimate participant in producing and interpreting knowledge — which is the same underlying access problem we see in unequal exposure to climate risk, and the same one we think art-science-technology collaboration might help address from an unconventional angle. Building science-aware societies, in that sense, is not a slogan; it’s a specific, researchable claim about closing an access gap, and we intend to keep testing it against the evidence rather than assuming it.
References
- Cologna, V., Mede, N. G., Berger, S., et al. (2025). “Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries.” Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 713–730. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02090-5
- Mede, N. G., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). “Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science.” Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473–491. DOI: 10.1177/0963662520924259
- Pfänder, J., Mede, N. G., & Cologna, V. (2026). “Global studies on trust in science suggest new theoretical and methodological directions.” Current Opinion in Psychology, 67, 102215. DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2025.102215