How the public understands and reacts to the term “climate anxiety”

Abstract

The term climate anxiety has increasingly appeared in the academic literature and popular discourse since 2019, typically when discussing young people's negative emotional responses to climate change. This paper reports results from a nationally representative survey of the Norwegian public (N = 2040) that investigated whether people respond differently to descriptions of young people “having climate anxiety”, compared with being “concerned” or “worried” about climate change. Results from the survey experiment showed stronger support for politicians taking young people's climate concern or climate worry into consideration when designing new climate policy as compared with young people's climate anxiety. Analyses of an open-ended question asking what people think of when they hear or read the term “climate anxiety” showed that most respondents (52%) provided neutral descriptions (e.g., worry about climate change impacts), 27% viewed climate anxiety as unfounded, irrational, or excessive, and equal proportions of respondents critiqued the term specifically for contributing to such negative associations (6%) or referred to climate anxiety as a reasonable and rational reaction (6%). These findings indicate that among some audiences, using the term climate anxiety may provoke reactance and be perceived as distracting from political actions to mitigate climate change. Our results give important insights into the potential consequences of the terms we use when reporting on climate distress.