Psychological impacts of climate change on US youth

Significance

This is a US survey to explore how a broad spectrum of psychological responses to climate change relates to youth well-being, mental health, and life plans. It is also one of the largest samples from any single country in the published academic literature. Here, we show that self-reported exposure to climate-related impacts is linked to increased eco-anxiety and associated psychological impacts, including on long-term life plans such as family planning and coping processes. While the United States is often positioned as a country not yet facing the worst impacts of climate change, our findings show that many US youth are struggling with the reality of climate change as it impacts their lives and individual prospects.

Abstract

Awareness of the threats of climate change is causing distress in increasingly documented ways, with youth particularly affected. Experiences such as climate distress and eco-anxiety have implications for the health and well-being of societies and economies, including individuals’ mental health and future planning, as well as their agency beliefs. Here, we show in a large sample of US youth (n = 2,834, ages 16 to 24) that the majority of US youth experience moderate climate distress and some functional interference from climate-related thoughts and feelings and a neutral to slightly positive sense of agency. They feel concern, interest, disappointment, frustration, sadness, anxiousness, and anger as affective responses to the crisis, and a majority report that their climate awareness may influence their plans for education, travel, and family planning. The key takeaway of this study is that the psychological impacts of climate change in US youth can have either impairing or strengthening effects, especially in the face of increased perceived direct exposure. Results show that self-reported direct experience of climate-related events is associated with increased eco-anxiety, climate distress, and impact of climate change on future planning, but also fortifying responses such as psychological adaptation and agency. These findings highlight the need for health systems and communities to prepare to address increased climate distress and related concerns in US youth as perceived exposure to climate-related hazards increases, in ways that strengthen healthy coping and agency to act. These findings have implications for the mental health of populations, climate behaviors, and life choices of young people experiencing these threats.

The psychological dimensions of the climate crisis, including a range of negative thoughts and feelings of varying severity, have been described using various overlapping terms, such as climate anxiety [“heightened emotional, mental, or somatic distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system” (1)], eco-anxiety [“chronic fear of environmental doom” (2)], and climate distress [“experienced distress in the context of thinking about, worrying about climate change” (3)]. These concepts have become increasingly researched for how they influence both mental health and society’s response to the crisis (4). How people are thinking and feeling about climate change and how those psychological responses impact individual and collective actions have enormous consequences for shaping economies and the ability to meet climate targets (5, 6). The impact of climate-related distress on mental health outcomes also has increasing relevance for predicting and responding to public mental health burden, particularly over the vulnerable period of adolescence and young adulthood. Despite the rapid increase in data on the psychological and mental health implications of the climate crisis over the last few years (particularly for the critical developmental window of adolescence and emerging adulthood), there is an insufficient number of studies to gain a comprehensive understanding of the implications on mental health, future planning, and climate action for different subgroups, including those who perceive themselves as having been directly impacted by climate change. As one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of US youth to date, we outline the widespread implications of climate awareness on the psychology, mental health, future planning, and behavioral choices of the generation inheriting the crisis and how the growing frequency of perceived direct climate experiences turbocharges such effects.

Eco-anxiety is a valid response to the existential threat posed by climate change that can act as a stressor to precipitate or exacerbate symptoms of mental ill-health and impair daily functioning, which is particularly prevalent in young people (7–9). Strong emotional responses and distress in the face of climate change can also spur action and can thereby be part of a healthy and adaptive response to current realities, supporting community resilience (3, 10–14). Evidence shows climate awareness and distress can also impact future planning, such as whether to have children (8, 15, 16). The question of how these developments are affecting youth is receiving increasing attention and has raised concern among child health professionals (7, 17–19).

Young people already face an escalating mental health crisis in the United States. The US Surgeon General reports that this is influenced by multiple factors in addition to climate change, including social media, gun violence, racism, and the COVID-19 pandemic (20). While such threats to youth well-being can conceivably be addressed by policy change, today’s young people must contend with a changing climate over their entire lives, even if progressive climate policies are consistently enacted from this point forward (21). Previous research shows there may be potential beneficial feedback loops to unlock, whereby taking climate action can have a protective effect on well-being and promote resilience, pointing out cobenefits for people and planet (22). Hence, there appear to be complex relationships between climate distress, climate action, and mental health and well-being which need to be understood to inform targeted interventions.

As the number of people with direct climate experiences grows, both in the United States and globally, it is critical to understand the implications for the breadth and severity of young people’s psychological responses to climate change. Much is understood about the mental morbidity effects of extreme weather events, but some emerging data, clinical narratives, lived experience, and media attention suggest that experiences of climate-related events may interact with the psychological responses attributed to climate awareness (23, 24). In short, while much of the previous literature has segmented between climate experiences and climate awareness (25), we hypothesized that this distinction may not be so clear-cut. This would mean that as more people perceive themselves as impacted by climate change, climate change may pose an even bigger mental health risk with broader societal impact, beyond the direct traumatic experiences of the extreme events themselves and associated with a growing and chronic sense of insecurity. The psychological response to climate change may also be potentially unique regarding agency, how people cope, and future planning, so we took a mixed set of tools at a large population level to start examining these concerns. While individual survey studies have examined psychological responses to climate change in young people, primarily targeting climate concern or climate worry(26), it has been challenging to develop a relational framework between different emotional, cognitive, and functional aspects of a young person’s experience of the climate crisis. In particular, what it means for their mental health, also in relation to adaptive coping styles, (27) their agency to respond, and future decision-making. This is in part as studies have not examined these aspects of the youth response to climate change or have not examined them concurrently, which would require a larger sample than most studies to date. To advance the field, there are calls to take a systems perspective to explore the relationships between young people’s experiences of the climate crisis and multiple outcomes of interest, including their mental health, psychological adaptation, and coping (28).

This online survey study has two main objectives. The first is to examine how young people in the United States are psychologically impacted by climate change. This includes measuring affective and cognitive patterns, including eco-anxiety, climate distress, climate emotions, and climate agency, as well as elements of coping and adjustment, such as psychological adaptation, meaning focused coping and the impact of climate awareness on future planning. This first aim was exploratory and descriptive, intended to capture a spectrum of psychological responses given the nascent state of the field that has only recently begun to unravel the nomological network of psychological responses to the climate crisis (29) with limited available evidence in the US youth population. With this goal in mind, the survey is composed of both existing psychometric scales and a small number of novel questions. These aimed to assess young people’s climate distress (scale measures cognitive-affective engagement and broad concern) and eco-anxiety (scale measures affective symptoms, rumination, behavioral symptoms, and anxiety around environmental change – the self-assessed extent to which thoughts and feelings about climate change interfere with everyday functioning). Hence, the eco-anxiety scale captures more severe symptoms and functional impairment than the climate distress scale). While a taxonomy of climate emotions has been proposed (30), there is no true consensus on which emotions are most relevant. We consulted with a Young Person’s Advisory Group to amend an existing list of well-studied climate emotions (31) to ensure that we were capturing the emotional lived experience of US youth. We also wanted to explore how young people are coping with and adapting to new climate realities and incorporated mixed measures to understand these concerns. For example, there is a known association between efficacy beliefs and anxiety (32), and therefore it was important to capture any sense of agency about the climate crisis in our sample. Climate agency includes efficacy beliefs that something can be done, as well as feelings of personal responsibility to address the climate crisis (3). We investigated climate agency in this sample to understand how psychological responses to climate change may interact with agency and ultimately precipitate different behaviors and impacts on well-being (3). Furthermore, a way of adjusting to the realities of climate change known as psychological adaptation refers to cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to the crisis that involve becoming more attentive to climate change, accepting its reality and implications, and adopting a problem-solving attitude to facilitate psychological adjustment (3). We measured psychological adaptation in our sample using the only previously reported scale developed for a climate context (3). In addition, a set of coping strategies called “meaning-focused coping” is known to be constructive for both mental health and proenvironmental behaviors (33). It involves drawing on one’s beliefs and values and finding the potential benefits in processing stressful experiences. Research with children and young adults has shown that meaning-focused coping in the context of climate change safeguards mental health and promotes action, by encouraging a more balanced perspective, active efforts to remain hopeful, trust in other actors, and self-realization. This is particularly the case when compared to problem-focused coping (directing one’s attention toward defining the problem that created the distress and finding a practical solution to it) or emotions-focused coping (using skills to distance or rid oneself from difficult feelings that arise from stressful experiences). We therefore asked young people whether the way they processed their thoughts and feelings around climate change produced positive outcomes related to personal growth and meaning-making, which would constitute a kind of meaning-focused coping. Finally, questions about plans for future life events were included because anecdotal reports have emerged of young people reconsidering their career, educational, reproductive, and other major life choices in light of the increasingly uncertain future under climate change (34).

The second major goal of the study is to test how the aforementioned psychological responses (emotions, perceptions, mental health) relate to an individual’s understanding that they have been directly impacted by climate change. That is, how self-reported direct experience (i.e., subjective attributions of personal experience) of climate impacts is linked with psychological responses and behavioral intentions (i.e., future planning). We were interested in how young people’s perceptions of being directly impacted, rather than “objective” indicators of climatic changes, were associated with psychological responses and with mental health outcomes, as it has been shown that extreme weather events or temperature anomalies in themselves show weak correlations with climate awareness and opinions (35, 36). Previous studies have indicated that when people perceive themselves to have been directly impacted by climate change, this may increase their “climate awareness” as well as their agreement with ambitious climate policies, though this has never been explored in young people specifically. Hence, we asked participants whether they had experienced a climate-related event and also asked them to select from a list of relevant events. We then examined how self-reported direct experiences influenced the range of psychological responses using a predefined analysis. The full complement of these metrics was created to enable a broad assessment of the multiple cognitive and emotional dimensions of young people’s climate awareness and to gain some insights into potential causes and consequences.

Results

Sample Description.

The responses were collected through Qualtrics’ panel service to mirror ethnicity, gender, and regional population distributions according to the US census with one deviation, namely that we oversampled explicitly from a number of regions that have been subject to recent climate-related impacts (e.g., wildfires, droughts, floods). It was not our intention to obtain a fully representative sample. This resulted in 2,883 valid responses, after excluding respondents who did not meet the inclusion criteria, failed Qualtrics’ internal quality check, or did not finish the survey. Nonresponse bias cannot fully be excluded, e.g., those who deny the existence of climate change may have been more likely to decline, the implications of which we consider briefly in the discussion. We implemented additional quality control tests to identify potential poor quality or dishonest responses. For further details, see SI Appendix, Appendix A. This resulted in a further n = 49 respondents being excluded (1.7% of the original sample), leaving N = 2834 as our final sample. The survey data were not weighted. For the calculation of scale scores, we imputed missing item scores using mean substitution only if less than half of the scale items were missing. If more data points were missing, the scale score was not calculated and treated as missing data. We employed pairwise deletion (available-case analysis) for all statistical analyses. All variables included in the analyses had less than 5% missing data.

Demographics.

Respondents were aged 16 to 24 y (mean = 20.4, SD = 2.5). Half of the sample (49.8%) identified as female, 43.8% identified as male, and 4.5% identified as gender nonconforming. A further 0.8% preferred to self-define, while 1.2% preferred not to disclose their gender. A relatively large proportion of the sample identified as LGBTQI+ (26.8%), although this is in line with a recent poll in the Gen Z population (37). White (non-Hispanic) respondents made up almost half of the sample (48.5%), followed by Hispanic/Latinx respondents (20.9%), Black/African-American (14.2%), mixed-race/multiple ethnicities (7.0%), Asian (6.6%), Indigenous (1.8%), while 1.1% preferred to self-specify. Most were studying at least part-time (32.3% students and 28.0% combining study with work), 26.4% were working, and 13.3% were neither in work nor in school. Most had finished high school (80.1%), and 16.2% had completed at least a bachelor’s degree. With regard to socioeconomic status, the median score on the Family Affluence Scale was 7 (IQR = 5 to 9; scale range: 0 to 13). The vast majority were resident in a metropolitan area (88.3%), while 6.8% resided in a micropolitan area, and 4.9% in a rural area, based on the RUCA classification of their reported ZIP code. For further details, see SI Appendix, Appendix B.

Most of the sample had experienced at least some anxiety in the preceding 2 wk. GAD-7 scores indicated that 21.4% of the sample was not or minimally anxious, 28.2% had mild anxiety, 29.9% had moderate to severe anxiety and 20.5% could be classified as having severe anxiety (GAD-7 mean = 9.6, SD = 5.7; scale range: 0 to 21). Of those who answered the question about their personal mental health history, 33.5% reported having a current diagnosis or receiving treatment for a mental health condition (184 respondents explicitly declined to answer and 4 left this question blank).

Outcome Descriptive Data.

We characterized the sample on a wide range of psychological responses to climate change. For details about the internal consistency and item descriptives, refer to SI Appendix, Appendix C.

Climate-related distress and functional interference.

Climate distress (possible score range: 8 to 40) was moderate in this sample (mean = 21.6, SD = 7.6). Applying Reser et al.’s cut-off scoring approach (3), in our sample 30.7% could be classified as experiencing low levels of climate distress (score: 8 to 18), while the majority (56.5%) was moderately distressed (score: 19 to 29) (19–22, 29–34, 38), and a minority (12.9%) was highly distressed (score: 30 to 40). On average, respondents in this sample scored relatively low on the Hogg Eco-anxiety Scale (39) (possible score range: 0 to 39), although there was high variation in the scores (mean = 13.1, SD = 10.1). The “anxiety about personal impact” subscale had the highest mean score of 1.03 (SD = 0.88), very closely followed by the “affective symptoms” subscale (M = 1.01, SD = 0.84), the “behavioral symptoms” subscale (M = 1.00, SD = 0.91), and the “rumination” subscale (M = 0.98, SD = 0.85). For further details, see SI Appendix, Appendix C. When directly asked to rate how climate thoughts and feelings interfered with daily functioning (e.g., sleeping, focusing): 0 (“not at all”) - 5 (“extremely”) respondents typically indicated experiencing “some” interference (median = 3, IQR = 1 to 3).

Climate emotions.

Of the 21 emotions probed in relation to climate change, the most highly endorsed were concern, interest, disappointment, frustration, sadness, anxiousness, and anger. Emotions that were rated relatively low included both positive (e.g., courageous) and negative (e.g., cynical) emotions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Mean emotion ratings (item score range: 0 to 3) for 21 emotions related to climate change. In orange are the emotions that were rated higher than the average across all emotions (thick black line), i.e., those most strongly endorsed in the sample. In blue are the emotions that were rated lower than average. Error bars represent 95% CI.

Climate agency.

In terms of agency (10), the total score indicated on average a neutral to slightly positive sense of agency within this sample (mean = 2.8, SD = 5.1), but responses covered the full range of the 10-item scale, from −20 indicating no agency at all to 20 indicating a very well-formed sense of agency. Among the individual scale items (possible score range −2 to 2), the greatest reported sense of agency was in the domains of awareness (mean = 0.6) and capability (mean = 0.5) (knowing which actions to adopt and believing in their ability to execute them) as well as in the power of actions to change thoughts and feelings for the better (mean = 0.5). The median item scores were 0 (neutral) for all domains except awareness (median = 1) and capability (median = 1), indicating that the sample held an ambiguous sense of agency on dimensions such as efficacy, (lack) of control, negative effect of their behavior on their own feelings and cognitions (causing burnout or fatigue), their ability to influence others, their sense of urgency, and feelings of personal responsibility (Fig. 2A).

Fig. 2.

The percentage of respondents in agreement with (A) the 10 items of the climate agency scale; (B) the nine items in the Psychological Adaptation scale; (C) the four statements of the Meaning-Focused Coping Scale, excluding any respondents who indicated that they “had not at all learned to process their thoughts and feelings on climate change”; and (D) the five items assessing respondents’ considerations of climate change in specific decisions regarding future plans. Note that (*) indicates items that were reverse coded in calculating total scores.

Psychological adaptation.

The mean overall psychological adaptation score (possible score range: 9 t 54) reflected the fact that, on average, respondents did not express strong feelings in either direction (mean = 32.6, SD = 8.7). Just a quarter to a third of respondents endorsed or strongly endorsed the various dimensions of psychological adaptation (Fig. 2B). Among the least endorsed adaptation actions was relocating in response to climate change.

Meaning-focused coping.

10.8% of the respondents indicated that they had not at all learned to process their thoughts and feelings about climate change. For the remaining respondents, the mean overall score for meaning-focused coping was 11.86 (SD = 3.62) out of a possible range of 4 to 20. This reflects the fact that most respondents indicated the items applied to them “somewhat” (Fig. 2C). A prosocial response to the threat of climate change was the most commonly endorsed, with 40% of respondents indicating that processing their thoughts and feelings around climate change made them at least “quite a bit” more willing to help others, while 90% said they were at least “a little bit” more willing to help others.

Worry and planning for the future.

The questions on future planning revealed that a relatively common result of respondents’ awareness of climate change was a self-expressed need to educate themselves on climate change in a way that school has not, in order to prepare themselves for a climate-changed future (38.7% responded “Yes,” 40.0% responded “Maybe”). A third (32.7%) of respondents strongly felt a desire to see certain places before they change or disappear as a result of climate change, and 37.5% saying maybe, indicating a relatively common fear of missing out, or a sense of impending loss of opportunity. A quarter (25.2%) agreed that climate change makes them question whether they will have children, with an additional 32.2% saying maybe (Fig. 2D).

Most young people worried about climate change at least “sometimes.” Nevertheless, among other possible sources of worry about their own future, climate change was a relatively infrequent worry, on par with COVID-19 and geopolitical events. Finances and career were more concerning to young people (for details, see SI Appendix, Appendix E).

Perceived Direct Exposure to Climate Impacts.

Descriptive data.

Slightly less than half (42.9%) of respondents indicated that they had been directly affected by climate change. Among this subset of respondents, the most commonly reported specific impacts were extreme temperatures (47.4%) and air pollution (42.4%). This was followed by floods (31.1%), prolonged exposure to smoke from wildfires (30.1%), superstorms or hurricanes (26.1%), drought (24.8%), significant local environmental change (23.5%), and wildfires (18.2%).

Effect of subjective lived experience of climate impacts on psychological outcomes.

The perception of being directly impacted by climate change was positively associated with the number of specific events the individual reported as having experienced (e.g., floods, droughts, wildfires). Having experienced any one of the events was significantly associated with increased likelihood of the subjective perception that one was directly affected by climate change (see SI Appendix, Appendix D for details).

Crucially, the perception of being directly impacted by climate change was significantly associated with higher scores on all the psychological response scales. This demonstrated increases in eco-anxiety, climate distress, and functional interference on daily functioning, alongside what may be considered signs of constructive responses, including a greater sense of agency, psychological adaptation, and meaning-focused coping (Table 1).

Table 1.

Comparison of outcome variables between respondents who indicated they had been directly impacted by climate change vs. those who had not

	Not directly impacted		Directly impacted
Outcome	N	Mean (SD)	N	Mean (SD)	Adjusted* Mean Difference (95% CI)
Eco-anxiety	1,590	10.1 (9.7)	1,198	17.0 (9.3)	6.9 (6.2 to 7.6)***
Functional Interference	1,576	2.2 (1.4)	1,193	3.0 (1.3)	0.9 (0.7 to 1.0)***
Climate Distress	1,584	19.4 (7.4)	1,195	24.6 (6.8)	5.2 (4.6 to 5.7)***
Climate Agency	1,581	2.2 (5.0)	1,193	3.7 (5.2)	1.4 (1.0 to 1.8)***
Psychological Adaptation	1,569	31.0 (8.6)	1,188	34.9 (8.4)	3.9 (3.2 to 4.5)***
Meaning-Focused Coping	1,405	11.1 (3.7)	1,052	12.8 (3.3)	1.7 (1.4 to 2.0)***

^*The linear regression model is adjusted for age, sex, education, family affluence score (FAS), rural vs urban, and ethnicity. *** P < 0.001.

Those who reported being directly impacted by climate change also reported stronger emotional associations with climate change, across the full spectrum of feelings we assessed, using the same type of linear model employed above, adjusted for the same demographic variables (Fig. 3). All the adjusted mean differences were statistically significant at P < 0.001. For the full table, see SI Appendix, Appendix D.

Fig. 3.

Mean difference in emotion ratings between respondents who reported having experienced direct climate impacts vs those who did not report this. As shown, all differences were positive, indicating higher emotion ratings in the directly impacted group. The dotted lines are the lower and upper bounds of the 95% CI around the adjusted mean difference in the solid line.

In regard to planning and worrying about the future, those who reported direct climate impacts were more likely to respond Yes when asked whether their awareness of climate change made them want to educate themselves in ways that school currently does not, in order to be more prepared for a climate-changed future (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 1.45, 1.32 to 1.60); more likely to think saving money for the future is pointless (aPR = 1.42, 1.18 to 1.72); more likely to want to visit places in the world that might change from climate impacts (aPR = 1.40, 1.25 to 1.56), more likely to question having children (aPR = 1.66, 1.45 to 1.91) and more willing to make big lifestyle changes (aPR = 1.60, 1.36 to 1.88). (Fig. 4). The percentage of respondents who worried frequently or very frequently about the impact of climate change on their future was also significantly higher among those who perceived themselves to have been directly impacted (41.6% vs 19.2%, z(1) = −12.88, P < 0.001

Fig. 4.

The percentage of respondents in agreement with each of the five items assessing planning for the future, as a function of their direct experience with climate change impacts.

Interaction between exposure to climate impacts and mental health/well-being.

Respondents who reported being diagnosed or receiving treatment for a mental health condition experienced greater interference of climate thoughts and feelings on normal day-to-day functioning, and this trend was stronger among individuals who reported direct experiences with climate change versus those who had not reported direct experiences (Table 2).

Table 2.

Mean scores for functional interference of climate-related thoughts and feelings as a function of direct experience with climate change impacts and self-reported mental health status

	Treatment or diagnosis of mental health condition (self-reported)	N	Mean interference score (range: 1 to 5), mean (SD)	Adjusted Mean Difference*
No direct climate change impacts	None reported (reference)	912	2.09 (1.45)	-
	Not current	142	2.15 (1.43)	0 (−0.24, 0.23)
	Current	397	2.27 (1.40)	0.21 (0.04, 0.37)*
Direct climate change impacts	None reported (reference)	548	2.80 (1.26)	-
	Not current	110	2.94 (1.37)	−0.11 (−0.39, 0.17)
	Current	482	3.28 (1.24)	0.47 (0.31, 0.62)***

^*The linear regression model is adjusted for age, sex, education, family affluence score (FAS), rural vs urban, and ethnicity. *P < 0.05; ***P < 0.001.

Demographic differences in key outcome variables.

While there are many significant associations between these psychological outcomes of climate change awareness and the demographic characteristics of age, gender, ethnicity/cultural background, education level, socioeconomic background, and rural/urban location, effect sizes were generally negligible, with some notable exceptions (Table 3 and SI Appendix, Appendix F). In particular (SI Appendix, Appendix F), higher GAD-7 scores were associated with higher eco-anxiety scores and higher interference of psychological responses to climate change on daily life. Participants who identified as belonging to different cultural/ethnicity groupings differed in how climate change affected their future plans for their finances and lifestyle changes. Participants who perceived themselves as having directly experienced climate change were more likely to have a higher GAD-7 score and to be more highly educated. We note, however, that the effect sizes were largely modest and such bivariate analyses should be interpreted with caution; we provide only to motivate relevant future studies.

Table 3.

Table summarizing the bivariate relationships between demographic characteristics and key climate psychological variables included in the survey

Highlighted cells indicate weak (light orange), moderate (dark orange), and moderate-strong (red) relationships. Blank cells represent negligible effect sizes. ***P < 0.001; **P < 0.01; *P < 0.05; ns = not significant.

Discussion

This study examines a broad spectrum of psychological responses that 16 to 24 y olds in the United States report experiencing in connection with climate change. We investigated affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects related to the perceived threat of climate change and the process of reckoning with the climate crisis and its implications for the future. With this, we aimed to lay the foundation for a more elaborate and robust conceptual framework that captures the diversity of psychological responses to climate change among young people and how these relate to their well-being and decision-making. Our findings underscore a key message: that self-reported direct experience of climate-related events is a significant indicator of how young people are thinking and feeling about climate change, as well as how this interacts with their mental health and behavioral intentions. Notably, respondents with self-reported direct exposure to climate impacts were more distressed and experienced more functional interference due to their thoughts and feelings about climate change. They also showed stronger emotional associations with climate change across the full spectrum, but with notably elevated moral feelings (e.g., betrayal, guilt, outrage), potentially indicating that young people feel they are failing and being failed by others in the context of climate change, particularly if they perceive themselves as personally affected. At the same time, respondents with self-reported direct exposure were more likely to find meaning in processing their thoughts and feelings around climate change, and were adjusting psychologically to climate change realities, including through making future plans based on their climate awareness (which may include adaptive and maladaptive actions), and had a more positive sense of agency, which includes beliefs that something can be done, and feelings of personal responsibility, to address the crisis. These findings align with others’ observations that “climate distress” is a multifaceted and layered emotional experience (40) and lays the groundwork for further conceptual development to support theoretical advances and more directed empirical investigations.

We did not intend to draw conclusions about the psychological and mental health impacts of specific climate hazards. We acknowledge the value of linking objective climate indicators (e.g., proven exposure to extreme weather events) to population-level mental health for the purpose of risk analyses and health service planning among other aims. Here, we provide an expansive view of the psychological correlates of young people’s lived experience. Reviews of the literature have shown that exposure to extreme weather events in itself has a very small effect on climate awareness (35, 36). Nevertheless, some recent studies examining significant climate-related natural disasters such as the 2021 Western North America heat wave and the so-called “black summer bushfires” that occurred in 2019 to 2020 in Australia have shown that these events do shape public opinion (23, 24). There are a multitude of factors that contribute (consciously or subconsciously) to someone’s evaluation of these direct climate impacts. The question of how this perception of having lived experience of climate change is shaped is therefore valuable in its own right. Most research recognizes that attitudinal shifts and psychological responses are likely moderated by individuals’ attribution styles, prior beliefs, and perceptions of their own adaptability. For that reason, self-reported experience of direct impacts of climate change is more substantively associated with greater environmental worry and climate anxiety (11, 23, 41, 42), as well as predicted higher risk perception, which then correlates with support for climate policies (43). People who experience extreme weather events, for example, flooding, can become more worried about climate change overall as it becomes a more salient threat, based on a stressful experience and negative emotions perceived to be caused by climate change (44, 45). This seems to be most true for people who have the least capacity to cope (i.e., maintain well-being in the face of climate threats and experiences), a concerning finding from a mental health and climate justice perspective (46). These people also have stronger intentions for personal actions to mitigate climate change and show stronger support for progressive climate policies. Confirming this, researchers found that symptoms of climate anxiety mediated a positive influence of self-reported direct experience of climate impacts on engagement with climate mitigation in Filipino adolescents (47). Previous work has also suggested that higher psychological adaptation to climate change is associated with experience of direct climate impacts, implying that various elements of coping may be catalyzed by such experiences (3). Our findings align with this growing body of research, highlighting that constructive ways of dealing with the problem can co-occur with feelings of concern and anxiety, including positive beliefs about agency, psychological adaptation, and engagement with the crisis through behavioral intentions and future planning (32, 48–51). We did not measure direct action-taking such as adoption of proenvironmental behaviors, voting, or support for climate policies, so we cannot make statements about the extent to which the observed emotional and cognitive factors promote behavioral adaptation and mitigation. Community-led responses and collective action will likely be vitally important in promoting both effective adaptation and mitigation as well as individual and community well-being. Thus, understanding the drivers of agency and action-taking should be prioritized in future research. One barrier, as evident from our observations, is that the construct of climate agency remains poorly defined, and the metric we employed has unsatisfactory psychometric characteristics. It would be advantageous instead to base investigations of climate-related agency on well-established and theoretically supported psychological constructs such as efficacy.

It remains unclear whether the observed adaptive psychological reactions can be maintained longer-term, especially in the context of insufficient broader government and societal commitments to climate mitigation and adaptation. It is conceivable that there is a limit to psychological adaptation and that distress and concern may start to take a toll on overall well-being, which reduces people’s capacity to take climate action. More research is needed to understand the enabling conditions (beyond curbing greenhouse gas emissions) for protective factors that may buffer against poor mental health and well-being outcomes, including longitudinal studies and in-depth qualitative investigations (43). Furthermore, online survey studies can introduce biases such as demand characteristics, influence from bots or other malicious responses. However, empirical testing has shown that these types of behaviors likely exert minimal effects on the findings (52), and we did apply additional quality control measures. While nonrepresentative surveys like ours can provide insight into climate distress experiences and other climate-related psychological responses, they cannot accurately determine the true prevalence among US youth. Nonresponse bias, which may have resulted in exclusion or climate skeptics and denialists cannot be ruled out.

We conducted exploratory analyses into demographic associations with the key climate psychology outcome variables, noting some interesting trends, but typically very small effect sizes. The most notable exception was a fairly robust association between symptom scores for generalized anxiety and both eco-anxiety and the interference of psychological responses to the climate crisis on daily functioning, suggesting that increased concern about climate change and its impacts could be associated with adverse mental health and well-being outcomes, or that already anxious youth may experience more climate-specific anxiety as well. There also appeared to be differences in how future planning is affected by climate awareness depending on the cultural or ethnicity background respondents identified with. College-educated respondents were more likely to perceive themselves as having been affected by climate change. These results are preliminary for the purpose of identifying potential patterns that would need to be confirmed in future studies. Additional representative surveys are required to attain estimates of the extent to which there is reliable demographic variation in the psychological responses to the climate crisis among youth; unlike in our study, previous studies have highlighted clear demographic variance in climate psychological responses, for example, across genders and ages (10, 53).

There is also a need for longitudinal monitoring of patterns in the psychology of climate change beliefs among the entire youth demographic, and particularly any interactions with other mental health factors and intersecting vulnerabilities for high-quality qualitative studies that can build a deeper conceptualization of the constructs and their relationships reported here. This would benefit the evolving field of climate psychology in its understanding and description of these emerging experiences and their relationships with perceived direct exposure to climate change. Such studies should use these results to inform their design. Substantive and sustained investment is required to develop evidence-based interventions and support programs that are age-appropriate and targeted.

Our findings indicate that the extent to which young people in the United States today have grappled with the idea of climate change as an overarching threat is likely highly differentiated. Targeted resources that match individual psychological needs may be required to help young people make sense of the impacts of climate change on their own lives and the lives of others, find effective coping strategies, and take action. This will also require training of mental health professionals to be “climate-aware,” as they will play a key role in highlighting, evaluating, scaling, and increasing the accessibility of both new and preexisting clinical and nonclinical interventions that may protect and promote mental health and well-being in the climate crisis (54). Mental health practitioners are increasingly encountering climate change-related concerns in help-seeking clients, yet most feel unprepared, or lack the resources to engage effectively with the issue, highlighting a clear need for interdisciplinary research and practice development (55) Policymakers can advance the provision of care by investing in the development of specialized evidence-based programs to equip mental health professionals, medical professionals, counselors, educators, and caregivers in climate-awareness training to support youth at the community level (i.e., in schools, on campus) and via youth-facing health systems. Policymakers can also support the integration of climate science and mental health education, as well as policies that support young people to develop stronger bonds to each other and nature. (56, 57).

Our findings also suggest that the field should shift more research and policy focus to understanding how the psychological impacts of climate change are creating clear but still emerging consequences for how people, especially youth, make life choices and do or do not get involved in solutions to the climate crisis.

We recommend including youth in decision-making processes (such as healthcare and climate policy processes) at national, community, and local levels. This may include youth representation in policy roundtables, panels for discussion, or focus groups. Climate policy and action, particularly in heeding the IPCC report, calls for participatory approaches of local communities and can benefit from an understanding of young people’s perceptions of direct climate impacts when shaping community action opportunities (58, 59).

Given that children born today already face up to seven times the number of extreme weather events as their grandparents and that these impacts are growing (60), the positive relationships we found between perceived direct experience and eco-anxiety, climate distress, functional interference, and future planning have implications for the social and economic well-being of future generations. Furthermore, we found that respondents with a current mental health diagnosis experienced more functional interference from their climate thoughts and feelings, particularly when they perceive themselves to have experienced direct impacts. The direction of effect is impossible to determine in a cross-sectional survey. However, what this does highlight is that young people living with a mental health condition may be made increasingly vulnerable to negative psychological experiences as climate impacts escalate and may need tailored supports. The exact nature of the relationship between mental health, well-being, and climate impacts should be a priority for future research to determine if, or under what conditions, climate-related psychological reactions can become a short-term or long-term risk factor for mental disorders (61).

At least a quarter to a third of young people we surveyed seem to be preparing themselves for climate impacts through reconsiderations of education, family planning, and travel as a kind of “last chance” tourism. The prospect of making (other) significant life changes (e.g., making lifestyle concessions) was less popular among this group of young people, with a minority (20%) indicating a definitive willingness to alter their way of living in response to, or in preparation for the effects of climate change. The proportion of young people taking a radically hopeless stance, such as believing that saving money for the future is pointless, was small. Notably, self-assessed exposure to direct climate impacts made future planning considerations more likely across all items, a finding indicative of a trend that has the potential to influence socioeconomic shifts. Notably, in relation to other—perhaps more concrete – worries like financial security and career choices, climate change was a less frequent concern in this sample. Those who reported direct experience did report more frequent climate-related worry, but also more frequent worries across the spectrum of issues queried. Our findings are nevertheless in alignment with conclusions from a recent review, confirming links between climate concern and reproductive decision-making (62) As the proportion of the population of childbearing age with direct experience of climate impacts grows, which under current climate projections remains very likely, (21) changing decision-making among young adults could have striking implications for birth-rates. Further research is needed to clarify the social and economic implications of young people’s eco-anxiety and climate distress. Our findings nevertheless underscore that direct experience of impacts subjectively believed to be exacerbated or caused by climate change may significantly shape personal life choices (63). Discerning how climate change is already influencing young people’s pivotal life decisions is key to envisioning and preparing for future challenges and opportunities in a rapidly warming world and enabling both psychological and physical community adaptation. Finally, our findings unsettle the idea that young people growing up today in the world’s largest economy will somehow be protected from the impacts of climate change. Our findings show that many US youth are already psychologically struggling with the reality of climate change as it impacts them personally and sense of their futures.

Materials and Methods

Survey.

We conducted a cross-sectional online survey of US youth. The questionnaire was based on the Changing Worlds survey originally conducted in the United Kingdom (10). The survey was later adapted for multiple global settings as part of a transdisciplinary collaboration (“The Changing World study”) representing the United Kingdom, India, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados, the Philippines, and the United States. (38) The Changing Worlds study sought to globally collect and compare data on how youth are psychologically responding to and coping with climate change. Understanding the diversity of lived experiences across different geographic and sociocultural settings in which young people are confronting climate change is important for informing evidence-based psychosocial support and climate policies. We investigated this in the United States by adapting the UK survey to the American context by implementing feedback from a US Young Person’s Advisory Group (YPAG). The YPAG consisted of 9 US residents aged 16 to 24 y old from across the country.

The survey was designed to assess psychological distress, a broad spectrum of emotions, and respondents’ sense of agency with respect to climate change, and the associations with mental health conditions. In the current study, we added several scales and questions covering perceived direct experiences with climate change, psychological adaptation, coping, and future planning. Direct experiences with climate change were self-assessed, i.e., we asked respondents whether they had personally experienced climate change impacts, first in general (i.e., yes or no) and later with a multiple-choice list of climate events (e.g., floods, wildfires, extreme temperatures), though they did not need to attribute these exposures to climate change to answer affirmatively. The first question is intentionally subjective as climate impacts are diverse and subject to individual interpretation. Because our focus is on the psychological responses to climate change, we classified respondents as directly impacted or not based on their own assessment. For the second question about specific impacts, respondents could have theoretically experienced an adverse weather event and not have attributed it to climate change. Whether people attribute an event to climate change may be influenced by various factors, including political affiliation, (43) but assessing these factors was beyond the scope of this study.

The Hogg Eco-anxiety Scale was included as a measure of how the respondents’ worry about the environment is impacting their emotions, cognitions, behavior, and functioning. We approached the concept of psychological adaptation in the manner described by Reser et al., (3) i.e., as individual adjustments in risk perception, threat appraisal, and associated emotional, cognitive, and motivational responses to climate change. The concept also includes changes in behavior that are associated with these affective and cognitive processes. We also included new questions on meaning-focused coping, adapted from a psychological adaptation scale developed for patients with chronic illness in a healthcare setting (64). In particular, these questions asked how processing thoughts and feelings about climate change may increase an ability to live in alignment with deeper values, beliefs, or a sense of purpose, which can motivate and sustain well-being in difficult times, and thereby constitute a form of meaning-focused coping (65). Finally, we asked whether respondents’ awareness of climate change made them want to educate themselves to prepare for a climate-affected future, whether that awareness affected family planning, educational, financial, and lifestyle decisions, and whether they felt pressure to experience certain places before they change.

The questionnaire was divided into 4 sections: (1) health and well-being, including questions on generalized anxiety, previous or current mental health conditions, and life satisfaction; (2) COVID-19 pandemic experiences and responses, included for context, but not reported here; (3) climate change experiences and responses, including direct climate impacts, and psychological responses as measured with the Hogg eco-anxiety scale (39), Reser et al.’s (3) climate distress scale, ratings of 21 climate emotions that were chosen based on feedback from this study’s Young People’s Advisory Group, a climate agency scale (also based on ref. 3, and previously used in ref. 10, a psychological adaptation scale (based on ref. 3), a set of questions targeting meaning-focused coping, questions on sources of worry regarding their future, and on the influence of climate change on 5 domains of future planning (e.g., decisions about where to live, whether to have children); and (4) demographic questions, including age, gender identity, education, family affluence, and ethnicity/cultural background. Respondents’ ZIP codes were classified according to rural–urban commuting area (RUCA) codes, which describe US census tracts using measures of population density, urbanization, and daily commuting. See SI Appendix, Appendix A for further details on the survey design and scales included. The questionnaire is available at https://osf.io/vr9xy.

The questionnaire was implemented on Qualtrics survey software and distributed to a Qualtrics research panel between November 2021 and January 2022. The inclusion criteria were age (16 to 24 y), literacy in English, and US residency. Respondents were eligible individuals recruited through a paid panel service. While we put quota and restrictions in place to specifically mirror ethnicity, gender, and regional population distributions according to the US census, the nonrandom nature of the sampling strategy means representativeness cannot be assumed. We also included additional participants from areas that have been identified as particularly vulnerable to high-impact climate events. We identified such regions at the county level as reported in the FEMA National Risk Index for Natural Hazards, National Lung Association State of the Air Report, and CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index (for details, see SI Appendix, Appendix A). While this is merely a proxy for potential subjective experience of climate impacts, we did confirm that participants from the selected regions were more likely to report having been personally affected by climate change (χ²(1) = 44.916, P < 0.001; see SI Appendix, Appendix D) While we made every effort to sample a representative cross-section of the US population, some influence of self-selection bias cannot be excluded. The cross-sectional survey taken during the COVID-19 pandemic provides only a snapshot at a time when respondents may have been experiencing a wide range of stressors. This may impact how they think and feel about climate change (66); however, other research suggests that the pandemic and climate change concerns do not draw from the same finite pool of worries (10). All respondents provided informed (digital) written consent. This study was approved by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board eProtocol #62589.

Analyses.

We registered our data analysis plan (https://osf.io/zm7rt) prior to examining the data and provide an updated plan which outlines any deviations (https://osf.io/tq324). The analyses were exploratory, focused on identifying patterns in the data, rather than on testing specific hypotheses. We present descriptive statistics on the outcome variables (mental health and well-being, eco-anxiety, climate distress, climate emotions, climate agency, psychological adaptation, meaning-focused coping, and future planning) and examine how direct experiences with climate impacts might affect these outcomes and their interactions. To evaluate the association between continuous outcome variables (scale scores) and direct experiences of climate change, we used linear regression with robust SE to account for unequal variance and adjusted for the following prespecified demographic covariates: age, sex, education, family affluence score (based on the Family Affluence Scale-III), rural vs urban, and ethnicity. We used modified Poisson regression to estimate prevalence ratios. (67) Finally, to explore potential associations between key outcomes from the climate psychology literature (i.e., eco-anxiety (29, 39, 42) interference of climate thoughts and feelings on daily life (8, 41, 68), future planning (15, 16, 50, 51), perceived direct climate impact (23, 43–45, 68) and demographic characteristics (53), we conducted correlational analyses, univariate ANOVAs, and Chi-square tests.

Supplementary Material

Appendix 01 (PDF)

Data, Materials, and Software Availability

Anonymized Protocol data have been deposited in OSF (https://osf.io/zm7rt) (69).