How Teens and Young Adults Feel about Climate Change
Gen Alpha 13-Year-Olds and Climate Change
Many young Americans are concerned about climate change. In a 2024 survey, Springtide asked 1,112 13-year-olds—the oldest members of Gen Alpha—about their perspectives on climate change. While 17% of these young teens say that they never worry about it, 59% say that they worry about climate change at least sometimes. Six percent of 13-year-olds say they worry about climate change constantly.
Many of these young teens predict that their generation will experience climate change differently than previous generations. About half (49%) of 13-year-olds say that their lives will turn out much differently than their parents’ lives due to climate change.
Largely, young teens feel that trying to reduce the impact of climate change is a good thing. Almost three-quarters of 13-year-olds (73%) say that reducing the effect of climate change is good for society, while less than one-tenth (7%) say that these efforts are bad for society.
Do teens and young adults care about climate change?
Among the 6,669 teens and young adults surveyed in the 2024 Springtide Study of Young People and Civic Life, 45% chose climate change as one of the issues they care about.
What Young People Say About Climate Change
In our 76 interviews for the 2024 Springtide Study of Young People and Civic Life, 43% of our interviewees mentioned climate issues. Several young adults emphasized the importance and urgency of addressing climate change. Some expressed disappointment in how the United States has responded to environmental issues.
The problem with climate change is not like the world’s gonna blow up, and it’ll never be here anymore. It’s like the world will become uninhabitable for people, right? And it will cause human suffering. And so, that is why doing something about climate change is so important to me.
For climate change, I think it’s a pretty central issue to me. . . . I definitely do think that climate change is human-caused [by] industrial pollutants, and it is one of the biggest problems of the century. . . . I’m disappointed that . . . not a lot seems to really be done for that issue.
There are things like climate where I’m like, we cannot be moderate about this. This is a life-and-death kind of situation now. We are too far gone to be centrist about this.
Note: Data presented in this Data Drop are drawn from two studies conducted by Springtide Research Institute. For the Springtide study on 13-year-olds, see survey responses in the topline survey results and review methodology here.
For the 2024 Springtide Study of Young People and Civic Life, see survey responses in the topline survey results and review methodology here.
