Who Gets to Care About the Planet? The Social Divide Behind Youth Environmental Attitudes
In a new publication led by Marcus Pietsch (Leuphana University), we ask whether young people's environmental attitudes are shaped by their socioeconomic background, and how the conditions of the country they grow up in widen or narrow that divide.
Drawing on data from nearly 700,000 students across 65 countries, the study combines a two-stage individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis with a machine-learning approach (Meta-CART). The pattern is consistent: students from higher socioeconomic status (SES) households hold stronger environmental preservation values — and the gap is already visible in Grade 4. It does not close as students move into secondary school, which suggests that schooling, in its current form, does little to level the playing field.
The more unsettling result came from the machine-learning analysis. The widest SES-based gaps did not appear in poorer or less open societies, but in nations that combine a free press with high GDP. Conditions usually seen as drivers of environmental awareness appear, here, to shape who gets to hold environmental concern rather than broadening it. Institutional openness, the authors argue, does not automatically democratize environmental concern — it can act as an accelerator of existing inequalities, turning environmental engagement into something closer to a positional good of the socioeconomically advantaged. This potentially bears implications for sustainability education: standardized approaches risk benefiting privileged youth most, and closing the gap calls for justice-centered, place-based teaching that connects sustainability to the lived realities of all students.
Paper Abstract:
This study examines global socioeconomic inequality in environmental attitudes among young people. Using novel data from an international study of nearly 700,000 individuals across 65 countries, we combine a two-stage individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis with a machine learning (Meta-CART) approach to examine cross-national variation in inequality in environmental attitudes and its associations with the macrostructural dimensions of capacity, distribution, and institutional openness. Higher socioeconomic status (SES) is consistently associated with stronger environmental preservation attitudes in both primary and secondary school. However, the strength of this relationship varies across countries. Revealing a structural paradox, press freedom and gross domestic product (GDP) interact to moderate SES disparities: the largest gaps appear in nations with both high institutional openness and affluence. Contrary to expectations, GDP and academic freedom do not exert consistent linear effects. The results suggest that national conditions shape the social distribution of environmental attitudes and that institutional enablers of knowledge may reinforce environmental engagement among advantaged youth, challenging the equity aspirations of sustainability education.
Bibliographic reference:
Pietsch, M., Eryilmaz, N., Strietholt, R., Scherer, R., Nascimento, M. M., Abels, S., & Fischer, D. (2026). Endangering Just Sustainabilities: An IPD Meta-Analysis on the Social Stratification of Youth Environmental Attitudes in 65 Countries. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 103085. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103085
