What The Climate Crisis Is Doing To Young People's Mental Health

“Many [young people] don't know what kind of world they're growing into,” said Maya Gislason, associate professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University and coauthor of the new paper, in a statement last week.

“We, as adults, are also wrapping our heads around climate change,” she explained. “Eco-emotions are our effort to develop a larger vocabulary around what's happening and reflect the complexity of experiences and emotions beyond anxiety.”

What kids are feeling

Gislason knew something was wrong when her kid came home from school clutching a couple of crayon drawings. “The first was blue and green; the second was a planet on fire,” she recalled. “Her question to me was: How old will I be when I die in 2050?”

It must have been devastating to hear. Not just because no parent wants their child to be filled with existential dread and anxiety, but because, well, it’s not wrong, per se. The planet is warming rapidly, with climate disasters becoming ever-more frequent and deadly. Global atmospheric systems the world has grown to depend on are breaking down. The Amazon rainforest is on its last legs. Whole species of animals are being wiped out by the generation, countries are disappearing before our eyes, and worst of all, nobody seems to be doing anything about it.

Is it any wonder they’re anxious? “Young people are very concerned,” said Dora Marinova, Curtin University Professor of Sustainability and coauthor of a study investigating climate anxiety in Australian young people, back in 2024. “And, in a way, [they’re] intimidated by the lack of concrete action being taken to battle climate change.”

Time and again, research has found an overwhelming majority of young people feeling worried about climate change: 81 percent of Gen Z in Australia; 73 percent in Canada; up to 70 percent in Tanzania and Kenya. Wider samples, in multi-nation surveys, turn up figures like 84 percent of young people across the world feeling worried about climate change; most report feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty about it – as well as a profound sense of betrayal by those in charge.

“[C]hildren and adolescents have complex and multifaceted emotional reactions” to climate change and environmental degradation (CCED), the new study confirms, including: “Feelings of anxiety and worry […] anger, hope, sadness, powerlessness, helplessness, happiness, empathy, guilt, and empowerment”. 

Kids reported an “overwhelming pressure to solve the crisis,” the paper notes, as well as “anger and frustration […]  typically directed at the inaction of governments, corporations, and older generations, as well as at peers, family, or communities perceived as indifferent, dismissive, or complicit in harmful practices.” Even this, however, “is less prevalent than sadness and threat-related emotions such as fear and anxiety.”

It's a lot to cope with – and, as you might expect, it’s having real-world effects on their lives.

The kids aren’t alright

Imagine the world was ending. What would you do? What wouldn’t you do?

That’s the reality for young people today. “We have a generation that doesn't know if they want to have children or not, especially young women and girls,” Gislason said; “we have youth who don't know what kind of a world to prepare for or what kind of an environment they'll be growing up into.”

Children as young as 9 or 10 are reporting feelings of anxiety over “the end of planet Earth,” the new paper reports. Other kids talk about having “no future” to plan for, and as a result, they just… don’t. As one respondent to a 2023 study put it: “We are taught to dream big and plan for the future but […] what should we plan for?”

The pressure of the current and imminent climate situation evidently weighs heavy on today’s young people, with any careless action being enough to trigger feelings of guilt and distress, some surveys found. Even decisions as simple as eating a chocolate bar are fraught: “I understand that dark chocolate is better,” one child reported, “[but] I don't like dark chocolate so every time I eat a chocolate bar, I feel so bad.”

If that sounds like a depressing outlook – well, yeah: depression was a feeling quite often reported by young people, with studies noting that just talking about the state of the environment could reduce some kids to tears – “one Brazilian participant experienced anxiety attacks when thinking about CCED,” the new paper says. “In other studies, participants reported impacts to well-being such as disturbed sleep due to intense eco-emotions including fear, anxiety, and sadness.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these impacts were particularly high among those young people who had personal experience of climate change and environmental degradation – Australians who remembered the Black Summer bushfires; First Nations Canadians whose winters were disappearing; even those who had simply noticed that they could no longer safely go outside in the summer were affected.

“I had dreams of people crawling out of these smoke-filled environments coughing, and that really scared me,” one kid said. “I had dreams of animals being slaughtered in factory farms.”

A sliver of hope

As dark as all this is, young people have a few things on their side that may help them pull through – and perhaps their most important resource is, well, you.

“We may not always know what to say, but we can show up,” Gislason said. “[We can] help them integrate what they're feeling, and decide what to do next so they're not facing this alone.”

Indeed, negative emotions weren’t the only ones uncovered by the paper. In studies involving workshops and activities around climate change, young people reported feelings of hope and ambition being fostered: “I was worried and frustrated before,” a participant told one study. “I still am, but I think I'm more ambitious now and kind of optimistic that we can make a difference.”

Similarly, anger at the older generations can be transformed into optimism for their own cohort. Looking up to activists like Greta Thunberg; joining community initiatives and action groups; even more simple activities like planting seeds and caring for plants can be helpful for raising the hopes of children and young people.

Not only that, but they’re concrete steps toward a more sustainable future – so it’s basically win-win. “When we engage young people's ‘heads, hands and hearts’ to tackle these issues, we're utilizing their intellects, their actions and their emotional intelligence to make change,” Gislason said.

Perhaps most of all, though, we need to take seriously these young people’s concerns about the climate and environment – and actually do something about them. As one respondent put it in a 2022 study: “[the] oceans are warming and temperatures are rising everyday […] I feel the scorching heat of the sun and it is definitely not good at all.”

“Youth want them [governments] to take action,” they said. “We need action now, we do not need it in the next twelve years, we need it now.”