Polls and trends are showing that Generation Z may be ready to give up on endless economic growth
By Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
We were alerted this week to a fascinating Dec 2023 Guardian piece, reporting on how Generation Z might be leading societies into post-growth or de-growth behaviours. We’ve extracted some data points below, and have supplemented them with points from these contemporaneous pieces in Foreign Policy and Earth.org
Online retailers including Amazon and eBay have reported surging sales of secondhand clothes, and the arts and crafts industry, which boomed during the pandemic, is expected to carry on growing for the rest of the decade as people prefer to make stuff rather than buy it new.
In a survey by management consultancy McKinsey in 2020, two-thirds of consumers said they wanted to turn their backs on fast fashion, believing that limiting climate change was even more important following Covid. The survey was commissioned to accompany a report on the fashion industry with a focus on the UK, which is Europe’s biggest consumer of fashion.
Clothing accounts for between 3% and 10% of global carbon emissions, depending on how the industry’s output is measured. As such, it has become totemic among the growing number of experts and consumers who want the capitalist merry-go-round to slow or even stop.
More broadly, in a YouGov survey in August this year, 46% of respondents said environmental sustainability had affected their general household purchases a “fair amount,” up from 41% of those surveyed in August 2019. Among 18-24s the change was starker, rising from 38% to 46% over the same period. (However, people saying it affected spending to a “large extent” fell from 18% to 15%.)
Young people are also less likely to drive a car, citing environmental concerns and cost. They are also more likely to have fewer or no children for the same reason, according to a survey carried out in August 2023, in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
Meanwhile, people are still facing severe financial struggles, with 1.8m UK households – almost 3.8 million people – reporting having suffered destitution at some point in 2022, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A KPMG survey found that two-thirds of UK consumers planned to cut discretionary spending this year.
For the first time since the mid-20th-century, young people from the world’s richest nations cannot expect to be better off than their parents.
…Younger generations are not just more in touch with climate change; they are also increasingly worried about it. In 2020, environmental non-profit Friends of the Earth estimated that over two-thirds of young people aged 18-24 experience climate anxiety, a feeling of distress, guilt, and helplessness about climate change and its impacts on the landscape and human existence. “As the group of people most likely to see the worsening effects of climate chaos, it’s not surprising that a surge of younger people is increasingly concerned, especially in the face of government inaction,” said Aaron Kiely, climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth.
In December 2021, a group of researchers focussing on climate anxiety surveyed 10,000 young people aged 16-25 across ten countries – Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the US. They reported that participants across all countries were worried about climate change – with 59% “very” or “extremely” worried and 84% “moderately” worried. More than 50% of respondents reported each of the following negative emotions: sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and guilt.
Green Party supporters are typically left-leaning. Indeed, research shows that those on the political left are generally more likely to consider global warming a major threat and advocate for more policies to fight it. They are also, generally speaking, young. This claim is backed by a 2023 study looking at the rise in electoral support for Green parties in Western Europe. By comparing data covering 40 elections in 11 Western European countries, researchers found that “each new generation is more supportive of the Greens than the generation before.”
More from our category on Youth here, and on environmentalists here.