Becoming a grandparent and worrying about the environment and climate change: evidence from German panel data

Abstract Climate change poses an intertemporal and intergenerational dilemma: the costs of mitigation are often borne today but benefit future generations, potentially creating intergenerational conflicts and challenging climate policies. Conversely, delaying or insufficient climate action shifts substantial economic, social, and environmental burdens into the future, where costs are expected to increase dramatically. Interactions and exchanges across generations might, however, make the future more tangible for older people, strengthening climate concern and support for climate action. We thus focus this study on grandparenthood, which is a key intergenerational relationship in ageing societies but is understudied in association with environmental concern and climate change. Using 38 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and fixed-effects models, we track adults from two years before the birth of their first grandchild up to eleven years afterwards. We find that becoming a grandparent results in a rise in concern about both climate change and the environment. Such concern increases as grandchildren grow older, and these increases are similar for grandmothers and grandfathers. Overall, these results suggest that intergenerational relationships foster future-oriented, climate-related concern among older adults and could be leveraged to reduce barriers to climate action.