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