Natural science Fewer young people are concerned about climate change
According to a representative survey, the issue of climate change is less important to young people than it was a few years ago. In 2025, only around four out of ten young people considered the topic to be very important - in 2021, it was still around six out of ten.
01.05.2026, 07:00
SDA
This was the result of a survey conducted by the Sinus Institute on behalf of the health insurance company Barmer, which was made available to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. At the same time, the proportion of those who rate the issue as unimportant has risen from 9% (2021) to 17% (2025). For the study, 2,000 young people aged 14 to 17 were surveyed online across Germany between October 16 and November 20.
The great fear of climate change has become less common among young people: in 2025, just under a third of young people (31%) said they were personally very afraid of climate change. In 2021, the figure was 39%. At the same time, 22% said they were not afraid (2021: 14%). Almost half (47%) described mixed feelings - unchanged from 2021.
Even if the topic seems to be losing importance among young people, the situation has not eased in any way. On the contrary, climate change is becoming increasingly evident in Europe: the continent has been heating up twice as fast as the world as a whole since the 1980s, said Celeste Saulo, head of the World Meteorological Organization, at the presentation of a report on the state of the climate. In 2025, Europe experienced, among other things, a huge decline in snow and ice cover, droughts, heatwaves, forest fires and ocean warming, much of it at record levels.
