Insight article

About the Sustainability Tracker

Read the background and methodology for our annual sustainability survey with UK consumers
2 min read
Consumer Insight Team

The Sustainability Tracker is an annual online poll carried out by Yonder, on behalf of Which?, with a nationally representative sample of around 2,000 UK adults each wave. The Sustainability tracker is part of our wider Consumer Insight (CI) tracker which covers the 'big picture' for consumers - how they’re doing financially, their wellbeing, their trust in business and their concerns as a consumer. Find out more about the CI tracker here.

For the last three years, Which? has been tracking consumer attitudes towards sustainability, behaviours and barriers to change through an annual tracker survey. The survey covers some of the most significant consumption behaviours in relation to carbon emissions, including the following: 

  • Transport: alternative transport use and consumer attitudes towards electric vehicles
  • Home insulation and heating: home energy usage and homeowner attitdues towards insulation and heat pumps
  • Holiday behaviours: holiday travel behaviours
  • Food behaviours: consumer food habits, including reducing, recycling and composting food waste and eating less meat and dairy
  • Products: homeowner actions when large household appliances break

Policy research reports and Insight articles

Alongside the data dashboards on the above topics we write annual sustainability reports that explore the latest changes in consumer attitdues towards sustainability, behaviours and barriers to change. Our latest publications from June 2024 covered electric vehicles and home insulation and heating.  Additionally, we periodically produce shorter Insight articles using our sustainability tracker data that can be found here.

Methodology

The Sustainability tracker is run annually on Yonder's UK Omnibus with a nationally representative sample of 2,000 UK adults 18+. Respondents are sourced from their panel made up of over 150,000 UK respondents. Stratified sampling is used to obtain a sample population that best represents the entire population whilst also minimising selection bias and ensuring certain segments of the population are not over or under-represented. 

Sampling quotas are set on age, gender, ethnicity and region. UK level data are weighted (using RIM weighting) to adjust any discrepancies between the final achieved sample and the known population profile, using the known composition of the UK. The weighting variables used are age, gender, ethnicity, region, social grade, working status and housing tenure. Targets for quotas and weights are taken from the PAMCo survey, a random probability F2F survey conducted annually with 35,000 adults.

Using the Sustainability tracker data

If you wish to publish articles or research using our data, please use our preferred citation: Which? (2024). Sustainability Tracker. Available at: https://www.which.co.uk/policy-and-insight/sustainability-tracker.

If you have any questions or comments regarding our Sustainability Tracker or our data dashboards, please contact us at consumerinsight@which.co.uk

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