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