Earth Day 2024: Changing Attitudes and Actions Towards Climate Change
After the tenth consecutive monthly heat record, apathy reins in the fight against climate change, especially among young men.
In our annual Earth Day report, we explore how attitudes to climate change are changing, who is responsible for leading the fight against the climate emergency, and what actions people are willing to take.
Key findings include:
- Fewer people think they will be failing future generations by not taking action on climate change, down 13 percentage points since 2021. Over the same period, fewer say businesses and governments will be failing their stakeholders and citizens by not combatting climate change.
- Young men (Millennial and Gen Z) are more fatalistic than women and older men on the topic of the climate crisis. A third of Millennial and Gen Z men say it is too late to do anything about climate change, compared to less than one in five Baby Boomer men and women.
- Two-thirds across 33 countries think countries like the US, GB, France, Canada and Germany should pay more to solve climate change. At the same time, France and Canada have seen an increase in people feeling they are being asked to sacrifice too much to fight climate change, with both countries now more likely to say this is the case than not.
- People do want to help in limiting the effects of climate change. In all countries people are more likely to say if everyone made small changes in their everyday lives this could have a big impact. However, they lack the knowledge on how to do this. They overestimate the importance of recycling and underestimate the impact of acts like not having a car or going vegan. Having easy access to information on steps to take in fighting the climate crisis is viewed as of one biggest ways in getting people to take more action.
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