The rise of terms like climate anxiety and eco-anxiety in recent years reflects the growing concern over climate change’s emotional impact, especially among the youth. A new study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology investigated how the Norwegian public perceives and reacts to the term “climate anxiety.” The study found that people reacted more negatively to the term climate anxiety compared to worry or concern.
“I have been researching worry about climate change since 2018,” explained study author Thea Gregersen, a senior researcher at NORCE. “Around 2019, the term ‘climate anxiety’ started appearing more frequently. Since then, it has been used, in both research and media coverage, to describe everything from the percentage of young people answering that they are ‘highly worried’ about climate change in surveys, to severe clinical symptoms.”
Interestingly, it has almost exclusively been used to describe young people, at least in the media. If ‘climate anxiety’ can refer to all sorts of negative emotional reactions, how is the general population supposed to understand and react to it? I wanted to know whether using the term could have unintended consequences, especially in public communication.”
The study was conducted through the Norwegian Citizen Panel, which surveyed a representative sample of 2,040 adults from Norway. The sample consisted of an equal gender distribution and a range of age groups. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: reading a vignette that described young people as having “climate anxiety,” being “worried about climate change,” or being “concerned about the climate issue.”
Participants were then asked to rate their agreement with the statement that politicians should consider young people’s climate distress when designing new climate policies. They rated their agreement on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Additionally, participants were asked an open-ended question about their associations with the term “climate anxiety.”
The survey experiment revealed differences in support for considering young people’s climate distress in policy decisions based on the terminology used. Participants were more supportive when the distress was described as climate worry or climate concern compared to climate anxiety. Specifically, the mean support score was 5.46 for climate worry, 5.38 for climate concern, and only 4.62 for climate anxiety on a scale where higher scores indicated greater support.
Further analysis showed that political orientation and self-reported climate worry influenced these perceptions. Those on the left of the political spectrum and those who reported higher levels of climate worry were more supportive of considering young people’s climate distress in policy decisions, regardless of the term used.
However, the negative reaction to “climate anxiety” was particularly strong among younger respondents and those who reported high levels of climate worry themselves. This suggests that even those who experience significant climate distress may view the term “climate anxiety” as problematic or stigmatizing.
The open-ended responses provided additional insights. While 52% of participants described climate anxiety in neutral terms, such as fear or worry about climate change, 27% associated it with something irrational or excessive. Only 6% viewed climate anxiety as justified, while another 6% criticized the term itself as problematic or dismissive.
“The term was popularized around 2019, at the same time as the youth climate movement was ignited,” Gregersen told PsyPost. “One goal for the young climate activists, sometimes described as having ‘climate anxiety,’ was to push for increased political action. One takeaway from our study is that there is relatively high support for considering young people’s climate distress in climate policy development.
“However, we do find that using the term ‘climate anxiety,’ rather than describing young people as being worried or concerned about climate change, decreased people’s support for taking their distress into account. We also find that some people, though a minority, have quite negative associations with the term. Our study is from Norway, and one important question is whether we would find the same results in other countries.”
“I think our results illustrate that we need to be careful with the words used to describe people’s climate concerns in public communication, and that we should consider whether some terms could lead to reactance or misunderstandings,” Gregersen added. “This is especially relevant in cases where a term (climate anxiety) is mainly used to describe one specific group (young people).”
The study, “How the public understands and reacts to the term ‘climate anxiety’,” was authored by Thea Gregersen, Rouven Doran, Charles A. Ogunbode, and Gisela Böhm.