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On climate anxiety and the threat it may pose to daily life functioning and adaptation: a study among European and African French-speaking participants - PubMed

On climate anxiety and the threat it may pose to daily life functioning and adaptation: a study among European and African French-speaking participants

Alexandre Heeren et al. Clim Change. 2022.

Abstract

The notion of climate anxiety has gained traction in the last years. Yet uncertainty remains regarding the variations of climate anxiety across demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, age) and its associations with adaptive (i.e., pro-environmental) behaviors. Moreover, the point-estimate proportion of people frequently experiencing climate anxiety has seldom been probed. In this study, we assessed climate anxiety (including its related functional impairments), along with demographic characteristics, climate change experience, and pro-environmental behaviors, in 2080 French-speaking participants from eight African and European countries. 11.64% of the participants reported experiencing climate anxiety frequently, and 20.72% reported experiencing daily life functional consequences (e.g., impact on the ability to go to work or socialize). Women and younger people exhibited significantly higher levels of climate anxiety. There was no difference between participants from African and European countries, although the sample size of the former was limited, thus precluding any definite conclusion regarding potential geographic differences. Concerning adaptation, climate anxiety was associated with pro-environmental behaviors. However, this association was significantly weaker in people reporting frequent experiences of climate anxiety (i.e., eco-paralysis) than in those with lower levels. Although this observation needs to be confirmed in longitudinal and experimental research, our results suggest that climate anxiety can impede daily life functioning and adaptation to climate change in many people, thus deserving a careful audit by the scientific community and practitioners.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material. Available at: 10.1007/s10584-022-03402-2.

Keywords: Anxiety; Climate anxiety; Climate change; Climate change anxiety; Eco-anxiety.

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestThe authors declare no competing interests.

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