Has ecology become part of everyday life in France?

In their book, La Con­ver­sion éco­lo­gique des Français. Con­tra­dic­tions et clivages, Ivaylo Petev, Phil­ippe Coulangeon, Yoan Demoli and Maël Gins­bur­ger ana­lyse the rela­tion­ship between the French pop­u­la­tion and cli­mate change, includ­ing their aware­ness of eco­lo­gic­al issues and every­day prac­tices. The aim is to under­stand wheth­er the French are pre­pared to act and what meas­ures they have put in place to pro­tect the environment.

Increas­ingly, the way we live is hav­ing an impact on the envir­on­ment. Ten years ago, the debates were very indi­vidu­al­ist­ic, focus­ing on the little things we do on a daily basis. In our view, this approach is open to cri­ti­cism. It’s not just a ques­tion of motiv­a­tion and opin­ion, it’s also a ques­tion of people being able to take action, depend­ing on where they live, their fin­an­cial resources, and so on. There was an increase in people’s aware­ness, but few sur­veys asked about atti­tudes, opin­ions, and prac­tices at the same time. It was dif­fi­cult to link the two, to under­stand the deadlocks.

The data was col­lec­ted in 2017, which may seem to be a long time ago, but there is a great deal of iner­tia in people’s prac­tices and habits. There have, of course, been changes with the evol­u­tion of tech­no­logy prices, the rise in demand for and pro­duc­tion of elec­tric vehicles, or the debate on air travel. How­ever, we don’t expect to see many major dif­fer­ences five years on.

Aware­ness of the dangers of glob­al warm­ing is grow­ing all over the world. The first signs were seen in the 1980s in the United States and Europe, with a rise in aware­ness in France from the 1990s onwards. A large major­ity of French people agree that we need to change our life­styles. Over 90% say they are con­cerned about the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with glob­al warm­ing. The dif­fer­ences are not huge, but there are some nuances. We noted two dimen­sions. The first is con­cern for the envir­on­ment, a con­sen­su­al con­cern that is less strong among people with few­er eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al resources. The second dimen­sion is dis­trust of tech­nic­al pro­gress, of the idea that tech­no­logy can be the solu­tion to cli­mate change. Belief in tech­nic­al pro­gress is slightly stronger among the poorest and old­est house­holds. Young­er and more highly edu­cated house­holds are more wary.

There are cer­tain areas where people are very con­scious of the need to take action. Sort­ing waste has become the emblem­at­ic ges­ture of eco­lo­gic­al prac­tices. It comes first in the list of actions that the French say they have adop­ted. This is fol­lowed by sav­ing water and buy­ing a less pol­lut­ing car. On the oth­er hand, oth­er areas remain unad­dressed, such as house­hold equip­ment, which is a bit of a blind spot when it comes to eco­lo­gic­al con­cerns. Yet refri­ger­at­ors, for example, account for 15% of our car­bon foot­print. And the list of elec­tric­al appli­ances goes on with tech­no­lo­gic­al objects (com­puters, tab­lets, con­soles, etc.). Anoth­er area iden­ti­fied is food, but we real­ise that habits are ingrained in our life­styles and our social­isa­tion, and that it is dif­fi­cult to take action. Eat­ing less red meat was not seen as import­ant in 2017, at the time of our sur­vey. Major infra­struc­ture changes, such as renov­at­ing and insu­lat­ing the home, are also missing.

We estab­lished four areas: food, house­hold equip­ment, sav­ing money and mobil­ity. We asked respond­ents about their opin­ions, their desire for change, their aware­ness of their prac­tices and their actu­al prac­tices; in oth­er words, what people think, what they say they are pre­pared to do and what they actu­ally do. We have iden­ti­fied four typ­ic­al pro­files: com­mit­ted con­sumer­ism (28% of the sample), eco-con­sumer­ism (29%), eco-cos­mo­pol­it­an­ism (16%) and frugal­ity without inten­tion (27%).

The first cat­egory cor­res­ponds to afflu­ent house­holds with chil­dren, a high level of fre­quently renewed equip­ment, high energy con­sump­tion, high waste pro­duc­tion and the use of more pol­lut­ing modes of trans­port. People are aware of the eco­lo­gic­al issues, but their beha­viour is not really chan­ging. “Eco-con­sumer­ism” is char­ac­ter­ised by a tend­ency to self-con­sume food, with a veget­able garden, little house­hold waste, few com­puter pur­chases and fre­quent energy-sav­ing ges­tures. Most of these people are retired or eld­erly, live in rur­al areas and have low or aver­age incomes. 

“Eco-cos­mo­pol­it­ans” are mainly young people liv­ing in towns and cit­ies, in small flats with few house­hold appli­ances and low energy con­sump­tion. There is a high level of long-dis­tance mobil­ity, but private cars are rare. This life­style is claimed to be envir­on­ment­ally friendly but is in fact very typ­ic­al of the trans­ition peri­od for young single people in their twenties.

Finally, “frugal­ity without inten­tion” mainly con­cerns under­priv­ileged house­holds with frugal con­sump­tion, with no claim of will­ing­ness or abil­ity to change their life­style. The envir­on­ment­al impact of the French pop­u­la­tion is there­fore very uneven, depend­ing on income, the type of accom­mod­a­tion occu­pied (detached house, flat, ten­ant or own­er, etc.), place of res­id­ence (city centre, sub­urb­an, rur­al), age and house­hold struc­ture (chil­dren, couple, single, etc.).

When asked the ques­tion: “Are you ready to take action?” 90% of those sur­veyed answered “yes”. In prac­tice, how­ever, action is mainly lim­ited to mat­ters of price, to small ges­tures that are loudly asser­ted, but whose con­tri­bu­tion to our car­bon foot­print remains fairly minor. Opin­ions about eco­lo­gic­al aware­ness are also forms of sym­bol­ic and mor­al status. There are many con­tra­dic­tions between the opin­ions of the French and their beha­viour. Young people, for example, say they are very aware, they sort a lot of waste, they don’t use the car daily, but they take more planes. For jour­neys of less than 80 km, the car­bon foot­print is low for people liv­ing in met­ro­pol­it­an France. Bey­ond 80 km from home, on the oth­er hand, it explodes for more highly edu­cated seni­or exec­ut­ives and young people, who are frugal in their day-to-day mobil­ity, but much less so for long-dis­tance jour­neys and leis­ure activities.

When we focus too much on indi­vidu­als, we for­get that the abil­ity to change habits is con­strained and con­di­tioned by social and eco­nom­ic changes. To the state­ment, “It’s dif­fi­cult for me to do some­thing for the envir­on­ment,” 60% of unin­ten­tion­ally frugal people say yes, and 46% of con­scious con­sumer­ists say they can’t do any more. Yet 80% of respond­ents in this group said that the pub­lic author­it­ies were not doing enough for the envir­on­ment. When you break it down, what can be attrib­uted to indi­vidu­al change is a small pro­por­tion that is heav­ily con­di­tioned by the resources and infra­struc­tures avail­able. The con­sultancy Car­bone 4 estim­ated that the share of indi­vidu­al action in redu­cing the country’s car­bon foot­print in order to achieve the tar­gets set by the Par­is agree­ments was around 20%. It is there­fore up to the State and industry to bring about a fun­da­ment­al transformation.

Sirine Azouaoui

Ref­er­ences:

La Con­ver­sion éco­lo­gique des français. Con­tra­dic­tions et clivages, col­lect­ive work by Phil­ippe Coulangeon, Yoan Demoli, Maël Gins­bur­ger and Ivaylo Petev, PUF, Par­is, 2023 based on data from the 2017 Life­styles and the Envir­on­ment survey