Since 1998, and continuously between 2012 and 2023, Istat has monitored citizens’ perception of environmental issues as part of the multipurpose survey “Aspects of everyday life”. In recent years, this information framework has been expanded by including a series of questions on the environmentally friendly behavior of the population. These behaviors, lifestyles, opinions and attitudes significantly influence environmental sustainability, generating useful data also for political decision makers.
In 2023, i climate changes are confirmed as the main environmental concern of Italians, with 58.8% of people aged 14 and over expressing concern, an increase of 2.2 percentage points compared to 2022. Following are the problems related to pollution of the air, felt by 49.9% of the population, a stable figure compared to the previous year.
Other environmental concerns include the waste disposal and production (38.9%, down one percentage point compared to 2022) and water pollution (38.0%, stable figure). The greenhouse effect and the hole in the ozone layer worry 33.1% of the population, but there was a decrease of more than 4 percentage points compared to the previous year.
Minor, but still significant, concerns include electromagnetic pollution, the consequences of noise on the health and ruin of landscapewhich worry less than three out of ten people.
Concerns about the climate have been central to the interests of Italians for years. However, attention to thegreenhouse effect has decreased dramatically: since 1998, when it involved almost six out of ten people, it has fallen by around 25 percentage points. Instead, fear about climate change increased from 36.0% in 1998 to 58.8% in 2023, an increase of 22.8 percentage points.
By analyzing the two problems together, attention to the environmental crisis has grown significantly since 2019, a year characterized by student movements “Fridays For Future“. The percentage of worried citizens reached 70%, remaining stable in the following years, except for a decline to 66.5% in 2021, mainly due to the pandemic and concerns related to it. In 2022 and 2023, the indicator is returned to 70.8%.
