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50 free Sustainability trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Sustainability trivia questions with answers. Sustainability trivia for Earth Day events, green teams, classrooms and pub quizzes with a conscience. The questions run from the word's origin in an 18th-century German forestry manual to the Brundtland definition everyone quotes, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement's temperature targets, the Montreal Protocol that actually worked, planetary boundaries, the circular economy and the three chasing arrows a student designed in 1970. There is plenty on the practical side too: which renewable source still generates the most electricity, how much more potent methane is than carbon dioxide, when Earth Overshoot Day fell this year, what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is really made of, why fast fashion is under fire and where a Swedish teenager sat down with a hand-painted sign in 2018. Easy ones open the set; the later questions will test a sustainability professional. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1987 Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as not compromising the needs of whom?
Future generations
The UN commission's report was titled Our Common Future and pushed sustainability into mainstream policy.
Q 02Sustainability is usually described as resting on which three pillars?
Environmental, economic and social
The three-pillar model dates from the 1990s; the SDGs later spelled the same idea out as 17 goals.
Q 03Sustainability is traced to Hans Carl von Carlowitz's 1713 book about which resource?
Timber
Sylvicultura oeconomica coined 'Nachhaltigkeit', urging that forests be cut no faster than they regrow.
Q 04In which city was the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972?
Stockholm
Rio hosted the 1992 Earth Summit that produced Agenda 21; Nairobi is home to the UN Environment Programme.
Q 05How many Sustainable Development Goals did the UN adopt in 2015?
17
They replaced the eight Millennium Development Goals and come with 169 targets due by 2030.
Q 06What is the target year for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals?
2030
In 2025 the UN reported only 35% of targets on track, with 18% actually going backwards.
Q 07Which is Sustainable Development Goal number 1?
No Poverty
Climate Action is Goal 13, Clean Water Goal 6 and Life Below Water Goal 14.
Q 08Which SDG number is Climate Action?
13
Goal 7 is Affordable and Clean Energy, Goal 12 Responsible Consumption and Production.
Q 09The Paris Agreement aims to hold global warming well below 2 C and to pursue efforts to limit it to what?
1.5 C
2024 became the first calendar year to exceed 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels.
Q 10At which UN climate conference was the Paris Agreement adopted on 12 December 2015?
COP21
It came into force on 4 November 2016; COP3 in Kyoto produced the earlier protocol, COP26 was Glasgow.
Q 11Under the Paris Agreement, the emissions pledges each country sets for itself are called what?
Nationally Determined Contributions
The bottom-up approach distinguishes it from Kyoto's imposed targets; pledges are refreshed every five years.
Q 12Which 1987 treaty phasing out CFCs became the first UN treaty ratified by every member state?
The Montreal Protocol
Kofi Annan called it perhaps the most successful international agreement to date; the ozone layer over Antarctica should recover by about 2066.
Q 13The 2016 Kigali Amendment extended the 1987 ozone treaty to which refrigerant greenhouse gases?
Hydrofluorocarbons
Q 21Which is NOT one of the five sectors where circular strategies could cut 9.3 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050?
Aviation
The five are cement, aluminium, steel, plastics and food.
Q 22Who designed the three-chasing-arrows recycling symbol in 1970?
Gary Anderson, a student
He won a Container Corporation of America contest and $2,500; the symbol is public domain and was never trademarked.
Q 23The recycling symbol's arrows are folded into which mathematical shape?
A Mobius strip
Anderson's original was an inverted triangle; the company rotated it 60 degrees to stand upright.
HFCs replaced CFCs and do not harm ozone, but trap heat thousands of times more effectively than CO2.
Q 14How many planetary boundaries did Johan Rockstrom and colleagues propose in 2009?
Nine
By 2025 seven had been transgressed; only stratospheric ozone and atmospheric aerosols remained inside the safe zone.
Q 15Which research institute is home to the planetary boundaries framework?
The Stockholm Resilience Centre
Rockstrom worked with Will Steffen and 26 other academics, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen.
Q 16Overshoot Day marks the date each year when what happens?
Humanity's resource use exceeds what the planet regenerates
The Global Footprint Network calculates it; humanity first went into overshoot in 1971 and the 2025 date was 24 July.
Q 17In which year did humanity first go into ecological overshoot, according to the Global Footprint Network?
1971
The date has crept from late December to midsummer; in 2025 it fell on 24 July.
Q 18The traditional linear economy is often summed up in which three words?
Take, make, waste
The circular alternative shares, leases, repairs, refurbishes and recycles to keep materials in use.
Q 19Which 1966 essay by economist Kenneth Boulding is a foundation of circular-economy thinking?
The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth
Boulding never used the term; the Ellen MacArthur Foundation popularised it from the 2000s.
Q 20Which organisation, named after a record-breaking sailor, has championed the circular economy since 2010?
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation
MacArthur set the solo round-the-world record in 2005 before turning to the economics of waste.
Q 24On what date was the first Earth Day held in 1970?
22 April
Senator Gaylord Nelson championed it, Denis Hayes coordinated and around 20 million Americans took part.
Q 25Which labour union's backing was credited with saving the first Earth Day from flopping?
The United Auto Workers
Adman Julian Koenig coined the name; the 1990 edition went global with 200 million people in 141 countries.
Q 26Which renewable source generated the largest share of the world's electricity in 2023?
Hydropower
Hydropower supplied about 14.3% of global electricity in 2023, though solar and wind were growing far faster.
Q 27Roughly what share of global electricity came from renewables in 2025?
More than 30%
The share is projected to pass 45% by 2030; solar investment nearly doubled between 2020 and 2022.
Q 28Which country had four of the world's ten largest solar facilities as of 2025?
China
Between 2016 and 2021 it added more renewable capacity than all advanced economies combined.
Q 29Over 20 years, how does methane's heat-trapping power compare with the same mass of carbon dioxide?
About 81 times greater
Over a century the figure falls to about 28 because methane breaks down faster; rice paddies are a major agricultural source.
Q 30Pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 was about 278 parts per million. What level had it passed by the 2020s?
420 ppm
Human emissions averaged 53.6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year between 2014 and 2023.