Study title

Data documenting the long-term trend of “environmental concern” in Germany is scarce. Referring to a survey question in the German socioeconomic panel, which measures worries about protecting the environment, the article looks at the development of environmental worries in Germany for the timespan 1984–2018. Basically, the analyses have a descriptive character. We explore several expectations and assumptions discussed in historical accounts of the environmental movement in Germany and in empirical studies on environmental attitudes and their determinants. Results show that overall development can be divided into a period of rising environmental worries in the 1980s, a considerable decline in the 1990s, and a relative stability since 2000. Environmental worries are associated negatively with the unemployment rate and economic worries over time. In the 1980s, younger were more worried than older people, but, in the meanwhile, it is rather the other way around. Education and (less so) income yielded significant differences in the 1980s and 1990s, but these differences have faded away since 2000. Data tend to confirm that environmental worries are shared more broadly in the population and that previously important group differences are increasingly leveling out.