Country rankings from the 2024 Global Green Attitudes Survey

As part of our 2024 Global Green Attitudes Survey, the data boffins over at polling firm Savanta have evaluated over 10,000 responses from ten countries around the world, in order to better understand public attitudes and readiness for green economy initiatives at the citizen level. By grouping responses together into categories, we’ve been able to generate a set of rankings to rate and compare the ten countries across key green economy metrics.

Here, we delve into the key insights and implications derived from the rankings – but as with the rest of the survey results, don’t take our word for it! Download and explore all the data tables, survey responses and country results, free of charge and open-source – and do feel free to use in your own work.

The index evaluates countries based on four main categories:

• Personal Cost Acceptance – a measure of how willing respondents were to pay higher taxes or higher prices in order to secure environmental outcomes, as well as assessing preference for either environmental protection or economic growth.
• Demand for Green Action – evaluated citizen support for government and private sector ambition on things like renewable energy, pollution reduction, decarbonisation, and so forth.
• Implementation Challenges – this metric analysed how respondents felt about the roadblocks to further action, including lack of government support, high costs, and lack of knowledge
• Environmental Solidarity – finally, this category measured citizens concern for future generations, sense of moral responsibility, and belief in individual accountability.

Each category is scored on a scale from 1 to 5, with detailed metrics within each category. It’s important to note that rankings such as these don’t capture all nuances of environmental engagement, but instead provide a framework for comparison that can inform strategy and identify opportunities. Countries with lower scores may face structural or economic implementation challenges rather than lacking environmental commitment.

Headline findings

Here are some notable insights:

• Overall, we see consistently that the strongest-performing countries on demand for action, acceptance of personal costs and environmental solidarity are those emerging economies with relatively less wealth than developed nations like Australia, China and South Africa.
• We also see there is a much greater spread between the highest and lowest performers when it comes to citizen demand for green action (a difference of 1.1 basis points) compared to implementation challenges (a difference of only 0.27). Does this reflect the fact that the challenges to green economic action are relatively universal, but the demand to address them is much more inconsistent?
• India: India shows strong engagement in personal cost acceptance and demand for green action but faces significant implementation challenges. This suggests a high level of public readiness for green initiatives, tempered by structural and economic barriers.
• China: China struggles with significant implementation challenges, indicating serious barriers to green economy participation. Some nuanced findings show that although public demand for green action is relatively low, Chinse respondents were more likely than most to accept personal costs acceptance in the pursuit of environmental protection.
• Australia: Australia is both the richest country of the ten surveyed, and consistently at the bottom of the rankings on measures of environmental solidarity, demand for green action and personal cost acceptance. Correlation, or causation? It’s certainly striking that a wealthy country with some of the world’s most beautiful natural landscapes (including the Great Barrier Reef) puts so little emphasis on the environment.

Strategic Implications

What do these rankings mean for our work in 2025? Broadly speaking, there are several conclusions we can draw, bearing in mind that we have a relatively small sample size covering ten rather disparate countries.

Firstly, countries with lower scores in specific categories may benefit from targeted support to address their unique challenges. For example, India could focus on reducing implementation barriers, while China might work on enhancing public willingness to accept personal costs.

But as well as overcoming these challenges, we see areas for potential collaboration, as high-scoring countries in certain categories can serve as models for others. For instance, Nigeria's strong environmental solidarity can inspire similar initiatives in countries with lower scores in this area.

While policymakers can use the index to develop tailored policies that address both public attitudes and structural challenges, there is also space for the private sector to leverage the index to align their sustainability strategies with public demand. High demand for corporate action in countries like Indonesia and Australia indicates a favourable environment for green business practices.

Conclusion

The rankings that have emerged from our Global Green Attitudes Survey can offer valuable insights into public attitudes and readiness for green economy initiatives. We hope that the findings could be useful for policymakers, environmental organizations, and businesses aiming to implement sustainable practices and policies. We’ll certainly be looking to build on these insights for our future work into 2025 and beyond – do let us know if you’d like to support or engage in the new year.

- Ben Martin