A questionnaire in seven languages: Climate change is a concern for young people, but how does this influence their mobility choices?
German Estonian Finnish French Turkish Chinese
Total
Never
4.0 % 9.9 % 14.1 % 21.6 % 64.5 % 58.0 % 17.1 %
Once to three times a year
74.6 % 71.6 % 79.3 % 65.1 % 18.8 % 36.2 % 65.4 %
A few times a year
19.9 % 18.5 % 6.5 % 12.5 % 12.3 % 5.8 %
16.1 %
Once a month
1.2 % 0.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 %
0.7 %
More than once a month
0.3 % 0.0 % 0.0 % 0.8 % 4.3 % 0.0 %
0.7 %
Total
733
81
92
255
138
69
1,368/100 %
Fig. 7 International travel
3.2 Young people take climate change seriously, but opinions differ over its causes
All young respondents agreed that climate change was highly significant. 14.7 % considered that it should be taken seriously, and 78.4 % said it should be taken very seriously. Just 0.3 % of all respondents (n = 1,333) stated that in their view, climate change should “not at all” be taken seriously. Asked about how strong they believed the link between travelling and climate change is (n = 1,367), 45.1 % stat- ed the link was strong. However, 35.3 % felt that the link was neither strong nor weak. Altogether, it emerged that 6.3 % recognised no link or a less strong link, whereas 57.8 % felt there was a strong or very strong link between travelling and climate change. Asked which causes of climate change they felt were the most important, respondents (n = 1,324) could again tick multiple boxes. The three most frequently chosen caus- es were pollutant emissions produced by travel, trans- port and production (77.5 %), ineffective political coop- eration / agreements between countries / states (70.2 %) and energy production (61.9 %).
In other words, most respondents felt that climate change should be taken very seriously and that it was due to human intervention. The responses indicate cross-language differences in terms of the most frequently chosen causes. Among the participants who completed the questionnaire in German, 83.7 % felt that pollutant emissions produced by travel, transport and production were the most sig- nificant cause of climate change. By contrast, 81.7 % of the Turkish-language and 83.3 % of the Chinese-lan- guage group chose large waste volumes as the biggest contributor. The least frequently chosen cause of cli- mate change, at 29.5 % overall, was lack of innovative climate-friendly ideas. Altogether, the responses indicate that young people feel that climate change should be taken seriously; and while their mobility choices may be critical, they are not seen as the dominant problem. Instead, they feel that the biggest causes of climate change are pollutant emissions produced by travel, transport and produc- tion as well as ineffective political cooperation/agree- ments between countries/states.
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