Key Takeaways
- People prefer easy actions: Nearly nine in ten people are willing to recycle or avoid plastic, and over 80 percent would reduce energy use or buy fewer things.
- Less willingness to make costly sacrifices: Only one-third are willing to pay higher taxes, and just over half would minimize their living space.
- The imperative to make the transition frictionless: People want sustainability to fit into their existing habits, andmaking low-effort actions easy and rewarding is key to accelerating the transition.
GlobeScan’s Societal Shift project explores how societies around the world are responding to the sustainability transition. The report offers fresh global insights into public attitudes toward sustainability, collective action, and how we can enable the transition to a more sustainable and equitable future. Survey data show strong support for making relatively easy lifestyle changes, but low willingness to make more costly or uncomfortable sacrifices.
When asked how willing they are to make specific changes, people claim to be most willing to make changes that are low-cost, familiar, or relatively easy to do. More transformative changes that require financial sacrifice or lifestyle overhaul face greater resistance. People are most willing to take everyday, tangible actions that feel personally manageable, like recycling (89%), avoiding plastic packaging (88%), and reducing energy use (85%), while support drops significantly for more costly or disruptive actions such as paying higher taxes (33%) or minimizing living space (54%).
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
GlobeScan’s research shows that while people broadly support the green transition, their willingness to make hard personal sacrifices, especially financial ones, is limited. Instead, people prefer actions that feel familiar and relatively effortless, such as recycling, reducing energy use, and avoiding plastic packaging. This signals a clear imperative: make sustainability frictionless. To accelerate the transition, governments and businesses must embed low-effort, high-impact actions into everyday life and design systems that reward sustainable choices without demanding sacrifice.
The Societal Shift project explores how societies around the world are responding to the sustainability transition. Our latest report offers fresh global insights into public attitudes toward sustainability and collective action, timed to support key conversations ahead of COP30. The Societal Shift project is part of GlobeScan’s Profit for Purpose Program, through which we commit 10% of our annual net income to initiatives that advance a more sustainable and equitable future.
Survey Question: Would you be willing to do any of the following changes to make the shift to an environmentally friendly country possible?
Countries surveyed: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Türkiye, UK, USA, and Vietnam.
