German concern regarding the consequences of climate change has risen significantly since 2009, although these anxieties remain lower than the levels of fear surrounding environmental damage observed in the 1980s. This analysis is based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), as reported by the DIW Berlin.
Since 2009, SOEP tracks whether and how intensely people worry about climate change’s future impact. The research team used the most recent year as a reference point, calculating standard deviations. According to the DIW, a deviation of 0.1 suggests a minor shift, while 0.5 indicates a major one.
The long-term evaluation shows a general upward trend in both climate concerns and worries about the overall environmental state since 2013. In fact, in 2022, the deviation for climate worry was more than 0.4 points higher than the reference value, though this dipped slightly in 2023.
A noticeable pattern is the difference between generations: younger people tend to express significantly greater concern about climate change’s impact than older cohorts. However, the panel also reveals that awareness is increasing across all age groups. “The baseline level of concern has been much higher in recent years compared to the beginning of the climate worry data series, and worry grows with age” stated Franziska Holz, who contributed to the research. For instance, a 70-year-old today expresses more anxiety about the climate than they did when they were 60, and they also worry more than 70-year-olds worried a decade ago.
While climate concerns have grown steadily, environmental anxiety in the past played an even more dominant role. In 1987, the year following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, environmental worries registered a deviation of 0.65 points, a level that was even higher two years later. According to Holz, themes such as air pollution and acid rain held much greater sway at that time. These major events, particularly Chernobyl, resulted in a sharp spike in public concern seen in the data afterward.
The SOEP is a long-term social science study that surveys approximately 20,000 households across Germany each year on various topics, with the data analyzed up to 2023.