How Does Climate Protest Turnout Compare?

It’s been five years since the Global Week for Future, a wave of protests that took place across 150 countries to demand action on climate change. The event was reported to be the largest climate strike in history, with more than six million people thought to have taken part. The 2019 protests followed on from the Fridays for Future school strike, led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

So, has this movement kept up momentum? Around one in ten people attended protests over the environment in the United States between June 2022 and June 2023, according to a multi-country survey by Statista Consumer Insights. France was among the nations with a slightly higher reported turnout, at 13 percent of respondents saying that they had gone to a protest in the 12 months prior to the survey, while Germany was at the lower end, at just 8 percent.

Across each of the polled countries represented on this chart, Gen Z respondents were more likely to have engaged in civic action than older age groups. For example, in the United States, 21 percent of Gen Z Americans said they had attended a protest over the environment in that time frame. However, these sample sizes are small and so a level of caution should be taken when interpreting the results.

While these figures may sound low, according to a study published in 2011 of campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance between 1900 and 2006, “no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of its population without either accommodating the movement or (in extreme cases) disintegrating.” The author of the study, Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, called this the “3.5 percent rule”.