University instructors tackle student eco-anxiety in environmental courses

When Simon Appolloni began teaching introductory environmental studies to a lecture hall of 500 students at the University of Toronto, he expected questions about carbon cycles and biodiversity metrics. What he found instead, through course surveys and office-hour conversations, was a quieter crisis unfolding alongside the curriculum: worry, grief, guilt, powerlessness and unease that his students carried into every discussion of the climate crisis. That emotional burden, which researchers call eco-anxiety, has become one of the most pressing hidden variables in higher education, and a new study suggests that universities are largely unprepared to deal with it.

Appolloni, along with a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers at the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment, surveyed instructors at five Canadian universities — Dalhousie, McGill, Toronto, Waterloo and Simon Fraser — to find out what, if anything, professors teaching environment-related courses are doing about the eco-anxiety in their classrooms. The study, published open access in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, contacted 157 instructors identified through university websites as teaching environmentally focused courses. Forty-one completed the survey, and six follow-up interviews were conducted, four with survey respondents and two with external scholars who had published relevant work on eco-anxiety. The results paint a picture of a teaching community that is deeply concerned but fragmented, under-supported and, in some cases, itself paralyzed by despair.

The scale of the underlying problem is well documented. A landmark global survey published in The Lancet Planetary Health polled 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 across ten countries and found that 75 percent reported feeling frightened about the future, 45 percent said climate anxiety affected their daily functioning, and more than half reported feelings of sadness, anger, helplessness and guilt — along with a striking sense of betrayal by governments and institutions that have failed to act. A parallel survey of 1,000 Canadian youth produced even starker numbers: 48 percent of respondents believed humanity is doomed, and 39 percent expressed hesitancy about having children because of climate change. In the United States, a separate poll found that roughly three-quarters of Gen Zers and Millennials said climate change had influenced major life decisions.

Crucially, the researchers emphasize that eco-anxiety is not a pathology. Clinicians and scholars, including psychologist Panu Pihkala and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, frame it as a normal — even rational — response to a genuine environmental emergency. Psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren has described some young people as suffering a kind of “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” anxiously rehearsing a future catastrophe that has not yet arrived, but the prevailing view in the literature is that grieving a deteriorating natural world reflects something deep in human psychology. Drawing on E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, the authors note that humans evolved in forests and on savannahs for the vast majority of the species’ existence; our attachment to nature is evolutionarily grounded, and its loss is therefore felt as a real, embodied bereavement. Suppressing that grief, research on emotion regulation suggests, carries its own cognitive costs: studies show that emotional suppression depletes finite attentional resources and impairs memory and performance.

The survey findings reveal an uneven patchwork of institutional response. Among the 41 respondents, only three said they had not observed eco-anxiety in their students. The researchers sorted the rest into three categories. Thirty-nine percent had taken little to some action, typically confining their response to class discussions or supplementary readings. Thirty-four percent addressed eco-anxiety directly or indirectly — naming the phenomenon, assigning journalling or creative projects, organizing nature walks, or pointing students toward positive news to counterbalance the doom-laden headlines — but treated it as an add-on rather than a core element of the course. Only 27 percent made addressing eco-anxiety a deliberate, integral focus of their teaching, incorporating multiple strategies, sometimes including mindfulness exercises designed to build coping skills and foster a hopeful outlook.

The obstacles instructors cited were varied and telling. Fourteen pointed to the sheer magnitude and multiplicity of student anxieties, which range from war and economic precarity to grades. Seven said packed curricula left no time for emotional work. Six struggled to strike a balance between presenting honest negative data and avoiding either paralysis or false comfort. Five cited a lack of training, with two fearing that intervening might make things worse. Five pointed to an absence of institutional support, and four admitted that their own sense of doom prevented them from helping students. Most strikingly, eight respondents identified countering negative messages from their own colleagues as a principal challenge. One instructor reported that a student had abandoned plans for an environmental engineering career after concluding from a course that the situation was hopeless; another recounted an engineering student saying the material was simply too depressing to study. “I had to ask myself,” that instructor said, “what am I doing? My model of teaching is about empowerment, and knowledge is not sufficient for empowerment.”

It is precisely this gap — between transmitting knowledge and building capacity for action — that anchors the study’s theoretical framework. The authors argue from a liberationist perspective on pedagogy, drawing on Paulo Freire’s concept of education as “the practice of freedom.” In a Freirean classroom, students co-learn with educators, develop critical consciousness, and participate as agents in shaping their own future rather than passively absorbing facts. The authors extend this logic with Maria Ojala’s concept of “critical hope”: not blind optimism, but a clear-eyed acknowledgment of how bad things are, combined with the conviction that change remains possible and that one has both personal agency and trustworthy allies in pursuing it. Freire himself called hope an “ontological need” that must be exercised through struggle, lest it dissipate into hopelessness. Importantly, critical hope is not a feel-good dodge. A study in Positive Psychology found that very happy people were more, not less, likely to take environmental action, suggesting that psychological well-being and serious engagement are complementary rather than opposed.

The framework also demands what Megan Boler terms a “pedagogy of discomfort” — allowing students the space to sit with painful emotions rather than suppressing or bypassing them. Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread, argues that Western societies lack the emotional intelligence to “stay with the trouble,” and that pushing down despair diverts energy away from the imagination and resilience needed to envision workable futures. Meanwhile, Mezirow’s transformative learning model, often invoked in sustainability education, has been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on cognitive transformation; its signature “disorienting dilemmas” can trigger denial and despair rather than action unless the emotional dimension is deliberately addressed. The authors also cite Sharon Stein’s typology of university sustainability approaches — mainstream, critical, and “beyond sustainability” — arguing that the last, which prepares students to face wicked problems with intellectual, affective and relational stamina, is best suited to the task.

The paper’s conclusion is a call for a coordinated, university-wide conversation rather than a prescription for any single technique. The authors acknowledge clear limitations: five relatively large universities and a modest sample size preclude firm generalizations about Canadian higher education as a whole. But the pattern is hard to ignore. Individual counseling services exist on every campus studied, and innovative programs are emerging — Simon Fraser University has hired an eco-chaplain devoted to ecological grief, Dalhousie University launched an Eco-Hope program after its own survey found rising hopelessness among sustainability students, and a University of Toronto symposium combined dialogue, art and future-envisioning practices. Yet these initiatives rely on patchwork funding and isolated champions. What is missing, the authors argue, is systemic integration: shared responsibility among instructors, students, administrators and staff, sustained funding, and training that equips professors — not all of whom are comfortable or skilled with emotional labor — to foster critical hope.

Ultimately, the study reframes the purpose of environmental higher education for an age of crisis. A pedagogy that informs students about planetary decline without building their psychological resilience, the authors contend, is inadequate — and may even be perpetuating the hopelessness it should be combating. To produce what one survey respondent called “actors in their own destiny,” universities must educate the whole person: mind, body and heart.