Survey: Japanese teens are nearly twice as hopeful about climate as adults

Asahi Glass Foundation’s seventh annual Survey on the Awareness of Environmental Issues Among the General Public released this month, revealing teenagers are nearly twice as likely as adults to believe humanity can still solve climate change.  The suirvey is conducted online from 24 to 26 June 2026 among 1,302 people aged 15 to 69.

Asked to rank the three most critical environmental issues facing Japan, 42.9% of respondents put climate change first, extending its run at the top of the list to seven consecutive years. Respondents across all generations described summers where temperatures pushed past 40C, worsening linear precipitation bands and downpours, and a knock-on rise in the price of rice and vegetables as crops struggled with the heat. The common thread was how extreme weather has stopped feeling extreme.

Population decline (12.5%) and “society, economy, environment and policy” (12.4%) took second and third place, swapping positions from a year earlier, as cost-of-living complaints layered onto longstanding worries about Japan’s shrinking, ageing population. Tellingly, high schoolers were the least likely of the three groups to say they felt no environmental crisis at all, 4.7% against roughly one in ten among both Gen Z and adults. They often traced their concern back to the classroom, recalling lessons connecting global warming to rising seas and food shortages.

The foundation tracks unease through its Environmental Doomsday Clock, a scale running from 0:01 to 12:00 in which the closer the hands sit to midnight, the greater the perceived risk to human survival. This year’s general-public reading is 7:03, “fairly concerned,” roughly half an hour earlier than last year’s 7:29. Adults set the clock furthest towards crisis, at 7:27, with the high-school generation close behind at 7:01. Generation Z gave the least anxious reading of the three, at 6:36, earlier even than the cohort several years their junior.

For comparison, the foundation puts the same question to a separate pool of environmental experts worldwide each year. Japanese experts set their clock at 9:30 this year, “extremely concerned,” roughly two and a half hours further towards midnight than the general public, even though both groups named climate change as their leading worry.

When respondents are asked whether humanity can still solve its environmental problems. High schoolers said yes, at least to some extent, 51.2% of the time; only 26.6% of adults agreed, a gap of nearly two to one. The pattern holds in reverse: 61.3% of adults thought a solution was difficult or very difficult, against 41.7% of high schoolers. Nationally, 58.5% of all respondents leaned towards pessimism.

That gap carries through into how each generation pictures a path forward. Asked what kind of global framework might eventually solve environmental problems, high schoolers (31.3%) and Gen Z (22.9%) most often chose “the United Nations leads global dialogue and consensus” as their top pick. Adults’ most common answer, at 20.0%, was blunter: that it is difficult for countries to cooperate, or for anyone to take the lead at all. A UN-led framework still placed second among adults, just behind that scepticism.

The findings highlight the influence of school-based sustainability education in fostering environmental efficacy among younger cohorts in Japan. While adult populations display growing skepticism toward institutional solutions amidst immediate economic pressures, youth retain confidence in multilateral coordination.