May 1, 2026, 8:16 amMay 1, 2026, 8:16 am
Those were the days: a “Fridays for future” demonstration in 2019.Image: EPA/EPA
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 around six out of ten.
This was the result of a survey by the Sinus Institute on behalf of the Barmer health insurance company, which is available to the German Press Agency. At the same time, the proportion of those who rate the topic as unimportant increases from 9 percent (2021) to 17 percent (2025). For the study, 2,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 17 were surveyed online nationwide between October 16 and November 20.
Great fear of climate change has become less common among young people: in 2025, almost a third of young people (31 percent) said that they were personally very afraid of climate change. In 2021 it was still 39 percent. At the same time, 22 percent said they were not afraid (2021: 14 percent). Almost half (47 percent) 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 the head of the World Weather Organization, Celeste Saulo, when presenting a report on the state of the climate. In 2025, Europe experienced, among other things, a huge decline in snow and ice cover, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and ocean warming, much of it at record levels. (sda/dpa)