Year: 2026
Type: editorial
Abstract: Over the past decade, climate change anxiety has moved from a mainly conceptual and interdisciplinary concern to a rapidly expanding empirical field in environmental psychology, mental health, and behavioural science. Early scholarship helped establish that climate-related anxiety can be an intelligible and often non-clinical response to real ecological threat, while also recognising that, in some cases, distress may become persistent, overwhelming, and functionally impairing. As the field developed, psychometric instruments and cross-cultural validation studies accelerated research output, but also made visible ongoing heterogeneity in definitions and operationalisations, including the boundaries between climate anxiety, climate worry, and broader climate emotions. More recently, large-scale population studies and quantitative syntheses have reinforced the public-health relevance of the topic and highlighted the importance of conceptually precise, culturally sensitive, and justiceattentive approaches to assessment and interpretation.Climate change anxiety has gained prominence as a construct capturing distress responses to perceived and anticipated climate threats. The term is used heterogeneously across the literature, sometimes referring to worry and heightened concern, and sometimes to more impairing forms of anxiety that affect sleep, concentration, decision-making, or everyday functioning. Several contributions focus on strengthening measurement and construct boundaries. Eco-emotions: validation of the multi-dimensional inventory of climate emotions in an Australian sample validates a multi-dimensional measure designed to capture a range of climate-related emotions concurrently, supporting work that moves beyond single-emotion approaches.Two adolescent-focused studies extend the psychometric evidence base for climate anxiety measurement in youth: Exploring eco-anxiety in Italian adolescents: psychometric evaluation of the Climate Change Anxiety Scale and theoretical insights into the association with pro-environmental attitudes evaluates the Climate Change Anxiety Scale in Italian adolescents and discusses links with pro-environmental attitudes; and Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the climate anxiety scale in Spanish-speaking adolescents examines psychometric performance of a Spanish version in a large adolescent sample, including evidence relevant to comparability across groups.At the level of climate-related worry, Reliability generalization meta-analysis of the Climate Change Worry Scale synthesises reliability evidence across studies, highlighting the importance of reporting and evaluating measurement properties in each sample and context.Finally, construct refinement is addressed directly in Eco-anxiety or simply eco-worry? Incremental validity study in a representative Spanish sample, which interrogates whether "eco-anxiety" provides explanatory value beyond "eco-worry", a question that is central for both theory building and careful interpretation in applied contexts.A distinctive contribution of the collection is the move beyond self-report distress towards functional and cognitive correlates. Climate anxiety impairs sustained attention: objective evidence of a cognitive cost provides objective evidence that higher climate anxiety is associated with poorer sustained attention performance, even when controlling for broader symptoms such as general anxiety and depression.Population The collection also broadens the discussion to specific settings and vulnerabilities. Impact factors of Arctic research stations on the mental health of team members examines how features of the station environment and design may relate to team members' mental health, highlighting the relevance of place-based and occupational contexts. A gender-and exposure-attuned lens is offered by Exploring eco-anxiety among women amid climate-induced heat: a comprehensive review, which synthesises evidence and gaps regarding eco-anxiety among women in the context of climate-induced heat and calls for more globally inclusive and longitudinal research.Several papers foreground identity and role proximity as key lenses for understanding climate change anxiety. The role of parental identity in experiencing climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors explores climate anxiety and pro-environmental behaviours through the lens of parental identity, illustrating how personally central roles may shape both emotional responses and engagement.Role proximity is also explored in Climate change anxiety in the scientific community: an exploratory study with Chilean climate change-related scholars, which examines climate change anxiety within a community that is professionally engaged with climate research, adding a perspective on how sustained informational exposure and responsibility may relate to distress and coping.A qualitative perspective on coping and emotion negotiation is provided by How Western Buddhist climate activists negotiate climate emotions, which analyses how activists draw on religious and community practices to engage with a wide range of climate emotions (including anxiety, grief, anger, guilt, and compassion) while sustaining pro-environmental engagement.The relationship between climate-related anxiety and pro-environmental behaviour is neither conceptually simple nor empirically uniform. Examining the relationship between ecological anxiety and pro-environmental behavior: personal and collective actions contributes to this debate by differentiating personal and collective forms of action, thereby sharpening the behavioural phenomenology of ecological anxiety. Together with the parental-identity perspective above, these findings encourage models that treat engagement as contingent on appraisals of efficacy and on realistic opportunities for meaningful individual and collective action.A recurring concern in climate anxiety scholarship is the balance between supporting individuals and recognising that distress arises within structural conditions. Climate anxiety as a call to global justice explicitly frames climate anxiety within a justice-oriented perspective, cautioning against approaches that reduce the phenomenon to an individual deficit while downplaying inequality, responsibility, and political agency.Relatedly, the inclusion of an emissions-focused contribution (Variations and impact factors of land use carbon emissions in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from a multiscale perspective) serves as a reminder that the psychological consequences of climate change unfold alongside (and are shaped by) mitigation trajectories, land-use decisions, and broader socio-ecological systems.Across the 17 contributions, several cross-cutting implications emerge. First, continued progress depends on specifying which facet is being measured (worry, anxiety symptoms, functional impairment, or broader emotion profiles) and ensuring instruments are psychometrically robust and culturally appropriate. Second, where climate change anxiety is linked to cognitive or functional outcomes, future research should prioritise designs that clarify temporal ordering and mechanisms (for example, the roles of rumination, attentional capture by threat cues, sleep disruption, and perceived controllability). Future research into the neurocognitive mechanisms that contribute to, and result from, climate anxiety may advance current neurocognitive models of climate anxiety and the role it plays in motivating climate action. Third, identity-and role-based perspectives suggest that climate-related distress may be intensified by personally central responsibilities (such as parenting) or by professional proximity (such as climate science), pointing to the value of supportive approaches that acknowledge moral emotions, meaning-making, and sustained engagement.Finally, the justice-oriented work in this collection underlines that supportive responses should not be confined to the individual level. Interventions and public communication that strengthen collective efficacy, foster realistic action pathways, and acknowledge unequal exposure and responsibility may be particularly important for reducing debilitating impairment while preserving the motivational potential of climate concern.This Research Topic illustrates a maturing field: measurement is being refined across populations; construct boundaries are being debated explicitly; and the empirical lens is widening from affective distress to cognition, functioning, identity, coping, and justice. Taken together, the collection supports an approach that validates climate-related distress as intelligible while remaining alert to functional costs and unequal burdens, and it charts clear priorities for rigorous, context-sensitive research and practice.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7135240283