As temperature records are shattered, ice rapidly melts and extreme weather events worsen, many people around the world say they are feeling more worried about climate change.
Researchers call this growing phenomenon “climate anxiety”.
A new analysis examines 94 studies focused on climate anxiety, involving 170,000 people across 27 countries, to explore who it is most likely to affect and what its possible consequences could be.
It finds that those who are more likely to experience climate anxiety include women, young adults, people with “left-wing” views and those expressing “concerns” about nature or the “future”.
Climate anxiety is negatively related to wellbeing, according to the analysis, but positively related to participating in climate action, such as activism and behaviours to reduce emissions.
Below, Carbon Brief explains the findings in more detail.
- What is ‘climate anxiety’?
- Who suffers from climate anxiety?
- What are the consequences of climate anxiety?
- How does climate anxiety differ from general anxiety?
What is ‘climate anxiety’?
“Climate anxiety” can be described and defined in various ways.
The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, considers the term “climate change anxiety” to “broadly refer to people’s feelings of anxiety and/or worry related to climate change”.
This is based on two established definitions, explains study lead author Dr Clara Kühner, a researcher of climate change and psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She tells Carbon Brief:
“There is a discussion in the scientific community about what exactly constitutes climate change anxiety.”
The first definition comes from a 2023 research paper, which describes climate anxiety as “persistent anxiety (apprehensiveness) and worry about climate change”.
The second comes from the American Psychological Association, which in 2020 used the term “eco anxiety” to describe “any anxiety or worry about climate change and its effects”.
Kühner explains that “eco anxiety could be interpreted as being more broadly related to the ecological crisis…but [the American Psychological Association] describe it as any anxiety or worry related to climate change”.
Her team noticed that there has been an “increasing amount of research” into climate anxiety over the past few years, she adds:
“Research on the topic has exploded. That’s a signal that it’s very relevant to researchers, but also to society and the public.
“But it was very difficult to get an overview of this research because it was scattered across different disciplines, not only psychology, but also public health and sociology. And so it was difficult to really know how much is out there. That’s when we thought: ‘OK, let’s put all of that together in a quantitative meta-analysis to get an overall perspective on the topic.’”
For the meta-analysis, Kühner and her team searched online records, scoured scientific conference agendas and contacted other scientists to try to identify all published and upcoming studies looking into climate anxiety.
They focused on studies that had conducted surveys with people self-reporting symptoms of climate anxiety. They also restricted their search to “correlational studies” looking at the links between self-reported climate anxiety and various factors, such as gender, age or political beliefs.
In addition, they only included studies involving people over the age of 18.
In total, the meta-analysis identifies 94 climate anxiety studies, involving 170,000 people in 27 countries.
Some 81 of these studies were published after 2020, according to the researchers – reflecting the surge of research interest into the topic over the past few years.
Who suffers from climate anxiety?
As part of the meta-analysis, the researchers looked across the 94 studies to identify what characteristics are most highly associated with having climate anxiety.
From this, the meta-analysis finds that those more likely to report feeling climate anxiety include:
- Younger adults
- Women
- People with a “left-wing” political orientation
- People concerned about the environment
- People concerned about nature
- People concerned about the future
- People who believe in climate change
- People who have been exposed to climate impacts
- People who are regularly exposed to information about climate change (such as climate scientists, journalists and teachers)
The graphic below shows the relative “effect size” of each of these characteristics, according to the study, with -0.9 illustrating the trait is less related to climate anxiety and 0.9 indicating it is more related.
On the graphic, the centre of each blue bar represents the effect size, with the start and end showing 95% confidence intervals.
By contrast, people with the opposite characteristics to those listed above – for example, those that are older, male or hold “right-wing” political views – are less likely to report feeling climate anxiety, according to the research.
The study only examines the correlations between feeling climate anxiety and various human characteristics – and does not look into the reasons why different groups of people may be more likely to experience climate anxiety.
One of the research papers cited in the meta-analysis finds that people under the age of 25 who reported climate anxiety were likely to have feelings of “betrayal” aimed towards older generations and to perceive governmental response to climate change as “inadequate”.
On gender, previous research – not cited in the meta-analysis – has found that women are more likely than men to suffer from mental illness following extreme weather events – and face higher health risks from climate change in general.
The meta-analysis does not look into how being transgender or non-binary could be associated with climate anxiety, but researchers have previously argued that these groups – along with other people who might identify as LGBTQ+ – are likely to face disproportionate climate risks.
The meta-analysis also does not investigate where in the world levels of climate anxiety could be the highest.
Most of the papers included in the meta-analysis were conducted in the global north.
Out of the 94 studies, 56 were conducted in Europe, 12 in North America, seven in Australia and New Zealand, seven in Asia, one in Africa and one in South America. (A further 10 spanned multiple continents.)
This “largely reflects the general dominance of western research in mainstream psychological and behavioural studies” – rather than a weakness of the authors’ methods, says Prof Kim-Pong Tam, an environmental psychologist from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who was not involved in the meta-analysis.
He describes the findings as “very significant”, adding:
“It should be noted that the pattern revealed in this meta-analysis does not necessarily indicate that the phenomenon of interest has rarely been studied in the global south or outside of western societies.
“It is common practice for authors conducting a meta-analysis to focus on publications in the language(s) in which they are proficient. This implies that studies published in non-English languages (usually in local journals), if any, are excluded.”
Dr Charles Ogunbode, an associate professor in psychology specialising in how people respond to environmental change at the University of Nottingham, UK, agrees that the “lack of studies from Africa and other parts of the global south is not a unique weakness of this article”.
He says that the “climate anxiety discourse is western-centric”, explaining:
“Outside of western cultures, climate anxiety may not feel like an especially useful concept for making sense of local lived realities. For example, one study found that feelings of anger and grief regarding climate change are more prominent in Turkey. Another study conducted with young people in three African countries found the predominant emotions to be akin to a helpless pessimism. Similar observations were made in Ecuador.
“It is, of course, valuable to have a comprehensive study on climate anxiety, but the western-centric nature of the concept means that we end up missing out on the nuanced cross-cultural dimensions of emotional responses to climate change.”
What are the consequences of climate anxiety?
As well as examining what human characteristics are most associated with climate anxiety, the meta-analysis explores what consequences are most associated with the phenomenon.
These consequences are grouped into three categories: “wellbeing”, “climate change emotions” and “behaviour”. (The meta-analysis considers “wellbeing” to be “how individuals evaluate the quality of their own lives, including experiences such as life satisfaction”.
The meta-analysis finds that feeling climate anxiety is associated with poor wellbeing and negative feelings about climate change.
However, climate anxiety is also associated with “pro-environmental behaviours”, such as saving energy at home, as well as participating in community activism and showing support for government pro-climate policies. Kühner explains:
“We found that climate change anxiety is a double-edged sword. It [is] related to poorer wellbeing and to more psychological strain. On the other hand, it [is] positively related to different forms of pro-environmental behaviour.
“On the one hand, it could make you feel uncomfortable. But, on the other hand, it may trigger significant action.”
How does climate anxiety differ from general anxiety?
One of the goals of the meta-analysis is to investigate if climate anxiety is a distinct psychological phenomenon – or merely reflects the broader recent trend of rising levels of anxiety across many parts of the world, particularly for younger demographics.
To do this, the researchers carried out a “meta-regression analysis”, a statistical method for, in this case, investigating the size of the impact of various factors on having climate anxiety.
This analysis finds that the characteristics associated with climate anxiety, such as being a young adult or female, as well as its associated consequences, such as taking action to reduce emissions, were “uniquely related to climate anxiety above and beyond generalised anxiety”. Kühner explains:
“From a methodological point of view, this means that these are distinct constructs, not that people who are generally more anxious are also more anxious about climate change.”
This finding could have implications for how both medical professionals and the public view climate anxiety, she continues:
“Sometimes, climate change anxiety is treated like a disease that has to be cured. And it’s not. It’s a normal healthy reaction to an actual threat.
“I think it’s important for policymakers, also journalists and politicians, not to pathologise climate change anxiety, but to interpret it as a functional reaction to something that is actually happening. Instead of offering mental-health support for how to get rid of this, we need more opportunities to channel this anxiety into climate change action.”
In some cases, climate anxiety can cause poor mental health, she adds:
“If [climate anxiety] impairs your daily functioning or affects your sleep, you definitely need mental-health support to cope with these strong emotions.”
In the UK, mental-health support is available from the NHS by calling 111, the charity Mind is also available on 0300 123 3393. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14 and at MensLine on 1300 789 978.
The post Explainer: What is ‘climate anxiety’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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