Audience: Youth

This post includes a roundup of climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from this week’s public polls – including new polling on the Build Back Better plan, climate agreements made at COP26, and young Americans’ climate attitudes.

Majorities of youth and young adults around the world are worried about climate change, report negative emotions related to the issue, and find government responses inadequate. In this study, youth or young adults were considered aged 16-25. 59% are very or extremely worried and 84% are at least moderately worried. More than 50% said they feel sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate—for example, 75% said that they think the future is frightening, and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet). Further, most rated governmental responses to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance.

Research has begun to show that awareness of climate change impacts children’s mental well-being and emotions. So far, most of this research from around the world has come from high-income countries. Many child populations that have been studied have experienced some level of anxiety and worry, but anxiety and worry have been measured using different kinds of survey questions in different studies. Some of this research has focused less on worry and anxiety and more on other feelings, including despair, concern, fear, grief, and anger. This review argues that there is a need for research into the impacts of climate change awareness on children’s mental well-being and negative emotions among a greater diversity of people and places.

In reporting about climate change, media should reduce blame, anxiety, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in their coverage. In this resource, young people (aged 16-25) said that those kinds of tactics make them feel less agency when they consume digital media coverage of climate. These young people generally experienced a four-stage process when consuming climate coverage on social media or digital newspaper media: observing, feeling emotionally effected, critically thinking about the content, and finally (sometimes) feeling motivated to engage in activism. 95% of these young people said they think they have the personal skills to cope with climate reporting on social media. Most also said that climate coverage tends to increase their climate anxiety but not any overall mental health difficulties.

Youth in Australia who are most worried about climate change are also most engaged with news and politics. Those most worried about climate also experience the most depression. This resource studied Australian youth from ages 10 to 19. Consistently, the youth who experience most worry about climate also follow the news most and also report more depressive symptoms. However, those who developed more climate worry as they aged did not experience more depressive symptoms than those who were moderately worried about climate, on average. Further, higher levels of these Australian youth experienced some level of worry (moderate, 25%, or increasing, 24%) than those experiencing low (17%) or decreasing (13%) levels of worry. 13% experienced persistently high levels of worry.

Place-based civic science (PBCS) can be a powerful tool to empower youth to act on environmental issues. This resource found that PBCS, as a method, resulted in youth feeling that they belong to a group larger than themselves and gained a sense of hope from working with others toward shared goals. PBCS is a teaching and organizing tool where young people partner on teams with older environmentalists, the teams study and act together to mitigate an environmental problem, and then present their efforts in a public venue. The youth involved in these PBCS teams were majority youth of color. This resource argues that PBCS can mitigate the stress and anxiety that young people can feel when learning about environmental issues without also being presented with ways to influence those issues.