Sustainability Trivia
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99 free Sustainability trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 99 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
Future generations are named in the report's one-line definition, which became the standard one; its findings also laid the ground for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.
Q 02Sustainability is usually described as resting on which three pillars?
Environmental, economic and social
Environmental, economic and social: the trio is everywhere, yet researchers who traced it found no single point of origin. It emerged gradually from early critiques of the economic status quo, not from one author.
Q 03Sustainability is traced to Hans Carl von Carlowitz's 1713 book about which resource?
Timber
Timber was running short for Saxony's silver mines, which devoured wood; Carlowitz, the official in charge of the mines, answered with a forestry treatise urging that woods be used only as fast as they regrow.
Q 04In which city was the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972?
Stockholm
Stockholm's conference led the UN to create its Environment Programme, which it then based in Nairobi.
Q 05The SDGs rest on which pledge?
Leave no one behind
Leave no one behind means progress is judged from the bottom up: governments promised to reach the people and countries furthest behind first, not just to lift the average.
Q 06Which is Sustainable Development Goal number 1?
No Poverty
No Poverty leads the list, and its first target is blunt: end extreme poverty for everyone, everywhere, by 2030, where the goals it replaced had aimed only to halve it.
Q 07The personal 'carbon footprint' was popularised in the mid-2000s by an ad campaign for which oil company?
BP
BP hired the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather and launched a footprint calculator in 2004; critics say the campaign shifted attention from the companies selling oil to the individuals burning it.
Q 08The Paris Agreement says countries should pursue efforts to limit global warming to what level?
1.5 C
1.5 C is the stretch goal set beside the firmer promise of 'well below 2 C'; 2024 became the first full calendar year in which the world's average temperature ran above it.
Q 09Which city hosted COP26 in 2021, whose pact was the first to name a fossil fuel?
Glasgow
Glasgow's pact was the first UN climate decision to single out the dirtiest fossil fuel at all, though a change late in the talks softened the pledge from 'phase out' to 'phase down'.
Q 10Under the Paris Agreement, what are the climate pledges that each country submits every five years called?
Nationally Determined Contributions
Nationally Determined Contributions are chosen by each government, not handed down, but the deal has a ratchet: every new pledge is supposed to go further than the one before.
Q 11Which 1987 treaty phasing out CFCs became, with its parent convention, the first in UN history ratified by every country?
The Montreal Protocol
The Montreal Protocol has worked: nearly all the banned chemicals are gone, and the ozone layer is on course to heal, last of all over Antarctica by about 2066.
Q 12The 2016 Kigali Amendment extended the 1987 ozone treaty to which refrigerant greenhouse gases?
Hydrofluorocarbons
Hydrofluorocarbons were the ozone-safe replacements for banned CFCs, but they can trap hundreds to thousands of times more heat than CO2, so the fix for one crisis fed another.
Q 13Which scientist led the team that proposed nine 'planetary boundaries' in 2009?
Q 21The recycling symbol won a student a 1970 design contest; what is the symbol's legal status today?
Public domain
Public domain: no one holds a trademark on Gary Anderson's contest-winning design, which is why anyone can print it on a product without paying or asking.
Q 22The recycling symbol's arrows are folded into which mathematical shape?
A Mobius strip
A Mobius strip has only one side, so a path along the three arrows never comes to an end, a neat picture of materials going round again; the original drawing stood on its point until the sponsor turned it upright.
Q 23Earth Day, first held as a nationwide US teach-in in 1970, falls on which date each year?
22 April
Johan Rockström
Johan Rockström led 28 scientists in mapping nine limits that keep Earth stable enough for civilisation; by the mid-2020s, check-ups found seven of them already crossed.
Q 14The planetary boundaries framework was first proposed in 2009 by a team led from which research institute?
The Stockholm Resilience Centre
The Stockholm Resilience Centre was under three years old when its team published the nine limits; they later became the outer ring, the 'ecological ceiling', of doughnut economics.
Q 15Earth Overshoot Day, when humanity has used up nature's budget for the year, is calculated by which organisation?
The Global Footprint Network
The Global Footprint Network divides what Earth's ecosystems can renew in a year by what humanity takes; by its reckoning the day has crept from the end of December in the early 1970s to late July.
Q 16Which Nobel Peace laureate founded the Green Belt Movement, which mobilised rural women to plant millions of trees?
Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai began by planting trees with women's groups in Kenya in the 1970s; the movement has since planted tens of millions, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to win the prize.
Q 17The traditional linear economy is often summed up in which three words?
Take, make, waste
Take, make, waste describes a one-way trip from mine to landfill; the circular alternative tries to design waste out before a product is even made, so that materials never become rubbish at all.
Q 18Economist Kenneth Boulding's 1966 essay, a root of circular-economy thinking, pictured the Earth as what?
A spaceship
A spaceship has no frontier to plunder and nowhere to dump, so its crew must recycle everything; Boulding set this 'spaceman economy' against the reckless 'cowboy economy' of open plains.
Q 19Which organisation, named after a record-breaking sailor, has championed the circular economy since 2010?
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation grew out of her record solo voyage of 2005: surviving for weeks on only what the boat carried taught her, she says, what 'finite' means, and she saw the economy the same way.
Q 20Which of these is among the five sectors where circular-economy methods could cut 9.3 billion tonnes of emissions by 2050?
Cement
Cement sits beside steel, aluminium, plastics and food in the estimate: reusing and redesigning those five could save as much each year as all of the world's transport emits today.
22 April was chosen with students in mind: it was a weekday between spring break and final exams, and some 20 million Americans turned out for the first one.
Q 24Which labour union, led by Walter Reuther, bankrolled the first Earth Day and was credited with saving it from flopping?
The United Auto Workers
The United Auto Workers paid for the organisers' phones, printing and mailings; coordinator Denis Hayes said that without the car workers' union the first Earth Day 'would have likely flopped'.
Q 25Which renewable source generated the largest share of the world's electricity in 2023?
Hydropower
Hydropower still led in 2023 with roughly a seventh of the world's electricity, even though drought pushed its output to a five-year low and fossil fuels had to fill the gap.
Q 26In 2025, renewables caught up with which fuel as the world's biggest source of electricity?
Coal
Coal was matched in 2025, and by the think-tank Ember's count overtaken, as wind, solar and hydro supplied about a third of the world's electricity; record solar output did most of the work.
Q 27Talatan, the world's largest solar park as of 2025, is in which country?
China
China sited Talatan on the high, thinly peopled Qinghai plateau, where the sunshine is strong and the land was desert pasture; it is racing to build farms on this scale to meet its emissions targets.
Q 28Over 20 years, how does methane's heat-trapping power compare with the same mass of carbon dioxide?
About 81 times greater
About 81 times greater, but only for a while: methane breaks down within roughly a decade, so measured over a century the same tonne counts for only about 28 times as much as carbon dioxide.
Q 29Atmospheric CO2, about 280 ppm before the industrial age, has been tracked since 1958 at which mountain observatory?
Mauna Loa
Mauna Loa's record, started by Charles Keeling, has climbed from 313 ppm to well over 420, with a yearly wiggle as the world's plants draw CO2 down in the northern growing season and give it back in winter.
Q 30The Great Pacific Garbage Patch came to light in 1997 when yachtsman Charles Moore sailed home to California from which islands?
Hawaii
Hawaii was the finish line of his race from Los Angeles; scientists had predicted such a patch nine years earlier, but it took a yachtsman on his way home to sail into it.