Understanding climate anxiety and potential impacts on pro-environment behaviours

Abstract

Previous studies have identified harmful social, physical, and mental impacts due to climate change. Anxiety due to climate change or “climate anxiety” may be an adaptive or reasonable response to a real threat; however, it may also be associated with considerable functional impairment of associated behaviours. In this study, we examined the relationship between climate anxiety and pro-environment behaviours, via an online discrete choice experiment, with 374 participants recruited from prolific academic and undergraduate university recruitment program. This experiment included our discrete choice measure of pro-environment behaviours and self-report survey items examining climate anxiety, general anxiety, death anxiety, and locus of control. We found that a moderate level of climate anxiety may be optimal for making pro-environmental choices, with this group having significantly more eco-friendly choices than participants in the low or high climate anxiety groups. We also examined the relationships between climate anxiety and three other psychological concepts, locus of control, general anxiety, and death anxiety, and found that these 3 factors were positively related to climate anxiety. These findings may indicate that some additional negative mental health outcomes are associated with high levels of climate anxiety. This study provides evidence for the use of discrete choice experiments when examining pro-environment behaviours, which may allow future studies to further examine various other trade-offs or factors such as the cost that participants are willing to “pay” for an eco-friendly option.