evidence: But is there empirical evidence for the climate change generation gap? Notwithstanding the logical sentiment expressed by young people that climate change is more pressing to them because they will live to experience its personal and societal consequences, existing research provides mixed evidence for a generation gap regarding climate change. On the one hand, some research findings indicate that young people are indeed more concerned about protecting the environment and addressing climate change, and express greater climate distress16,17,18,19,20. Data from over 27,000 citizens across the 28 European Union countries also show that those aged 15–24 years old are more likely to be concerned about climate change than those aged 55 and over21. [...] To examine these questions, we analysed data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS), which is a longitudinal national probability study that has been assessing people’s socio-political attitudes annually since 2009. Panel data allow examination of the development of climate change beliefs for the same individual over time, as well as afford better examination of temporal change in climate change beliefs than cross-sectional public opinion polls. Building on recent advances in structural equation models, we use a data analytical approach that disentangles age and cohort effects by examining whether changes in climate change beliefs increase or decrease with the same rate of change across different age cohorts.