Hurricane Stress and Climate Anxiety: Social Ties Can Cut Both Ways, Study Finds

When Hurricanes Helene and Milton tore through the southeastern United States in 2024, they left behind more than flooded neighborhoods and downed power lines. They left a psychological residue that researchers are only beginning to quantify. A new study published in PLOS Mental Health offers one of the most detailed portraits yet of how the stresses of living through back-to-back hurricanes translate into climate anxiety, the chronic worry many people now feel about a warming and increasingly volatile planet. Drawing on survey responses from 1,342 residents across Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida, the research team led by Francis Dalisay and colleagues found that direct exposure to hurricane stressors was reliably linked to higher levels of climate anxiety, even after accounting for generalized anxiety symptoms. But the study’s most striking contribution lies in what it reveals about social capital, the web of relationships that communities rely on in times of crisis, and how different forms of those relationships can either buffer or amplify climate-related distress.

The researchers organized hurricane stressors into the accumulated burdens that survivors carry in the weeks and months after landfall: property damage, displacement, loss of utilities, financial strain, and the sheer disruption of daily routines. Their central hypothesis was straightforward. People who experienced more of these stressors would report more climate anxiety, a construct that goes beyond ordinary fear of storms and encompasses persistent, future-oriented worry about environmental collapse. The data supported that expectation. Across the sample, hurricane stressors showed a positive association with climate anxiety, and critically, that association survived statistical controls for generalized anxiety disorder symptoms. This distinction matters, because skeptics have sometimes argued that what gets labeled climate anxiety is simply garden-variety anxiety wearing an environmental costume. By demonstrating that hurricane-specific stressors predict climate anxiety independently of general anxious disposition, the study strengthens the case that climate anxiety is a distinct psychological phenomenon rooted in lived experience with extreme weather.

The conceptual heart of the paper, however, is its treatment of social capital. Social scientists typically divide this resource into three forms. Bonding social capital refers to close ties among people who are similar to one another, such as family members, longtime friends, and tight-knit neighbors. Bridging social capital describes connections that span social distance, linking people across different groups, neighborhoods, and backgrounds. Linking social capital captures vertical relationships between citizens and institutions, such as trust in government agencies, emergency managers, and public officials. Each form is thought to serve a different function in a disaster. Bonding ties provide emotional support and immediate material help; bridging ties circulate new information and resources across community boundaries; linking ties connect survivors to the formal machinery of response and recovery. The researchers asked not only whether each form was associated with climate anxiety on its own, but whether each form moderated the relationship between hurricane stressors and climate anxiety, that is, whether it changed how strongly stressors translated into anxious rumination about climate change.

The answers were more complicated than the comforting narrative that community connection always protects mental health. Bonding social capital, on its own, showed a direct negative association with climate anxiety. People embedded in dense networks of close, similar others reported less climate-related worry overall, consistent with the idea that intimate support networks provide reassurance, shared meaning, and a sense of belonging that dampens existential dread. Yet when the researchers examined how bonding capital interacted with hurricane stressors, they uncovered a conditional and ultimately reversible pattern. Bonding social capital weakened the link between stressors and climate anxiety only when hurricane stressors were low. As stressors accumulated, the protective effect inverted: among people facing heavy hurricane burdens, strong bonding ties actually strengthened the association between stressors and climate anxiety.

The authors interpret this reversal as evidence that close-knit networks can become echo chambers for shared distress. When a whole family or neighborhood has been hit hard, conversations within bonding ties may center on losses, fears, and grim comparisons, reinforcing rather than soothing climate-related worry. Emotional contagion within dense networks is a well-documented phenomenon, and the study’s findings suggest that in the aftermath of severe disasters, the same ties that comfort people in ordinary times may instead amplify a collective sense of threat. This nuance carries practical weight for disaster mental health programs, which often assume that strengthening community cohesion is uniformly beneficial. The findings caution that the timing and severity of exposure shape whether close ties heal or hurt, and that practitioners should not treat social support as a one-size-fits-all prescription.

Bridging and linking social capital told a different and, at first glance, counterintuitive story. Both forms were positively associated with climate anxiety in their own right, and both strengthened the positive relationship between hurricane stressors and climate anxiety. In other words, people with more far-reaching connections and more trust in institutions reported more climate anxiety, not less, and their stressors translated into anxiety more strongly. The researchers suggest a plausible mechanism: awareness. Bridging ties expose people to diverse perspectives and information, including alarming climate science and coverage of environmental degradation, while linking ties connect individuals to institutional communications about hazards, warnings, and the scale of the climate problem. People embedded in these wider webs may simply know more about the magnitude of climate change, and knowledge of that kind, however accurate, can feed anxious rumination rather than relieve it.

This pattern complicates a long-standing assumption in community psychology and disaster research, namely that broader and more institutional forms of connection are unambiguously protective. The study does not claim that bridging or linking capital is harmful in a general sense; both forms are widely associated with better access to resources, faster recovery, and greater civic engagement. What it does suggest is that in the specific psychological domain of climate anxiety, wider awareness can come at an emotional cost. A person whose bridging ties span environmental advocacy networks and whose linking ties keep them attuned to government climate communications may be better informed and better resourced, yet also more acutely conscious of the trajectory of global warming. Anxiety, in this framing, is partly a byproduct of engagement with the wider world.

Methodologically, the study is a cross-sectional survey, which means it captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causal direction. It remains possible, for example, that people with higher climate anxiety perceive their hurricane stressors as more severe, or that anxious individuals seek out and maintain broader networks. The sample was drawn from states struck by Helene in the Appalachian regions of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and by Milton in Florida, giving the researchers a population with fresh, vivid experience of consecutive major hurricanes in a single season. The authors controlled for generalized anxiety symptoms to isolate the climate-specific component of distress, a design choice that lends credibility to their central claim that hurricane exposure relates specifically to climate anxiety rather than to anxious temperament in general.

The theoretical implications reach into ongoing debates about how people psychologically process climate change. One influential line of thinking holds that direct experience with extreme weather is a powerful driver of climate concern, converting abstract global models into concrete personal reality. This study supports that view while adding a social dimension: the psychological impact of experience is not fixed but is filtered through the structure of a person’s relationships. The same hurricane, hitting two neighbors equally hard, may produce different levels of climate anxiety depending on whether each is embedded in a tight family cluster, a wide bridging network, or a trusting relationship with public institutions. Climate anxiety, on this account, is not merely an individual response to environmental threat but a socially distributed phenomenon that travels through networks.

For practitioners and policymakers, the findings point toward more differentiated strategies. Community-based disaster recovery programs that cultivate bonding ties may still deliver comfort and material aid, but they should be attentive to the possibility that in heavily impacted communities, those same ties can circulate shared dread. Programs that leverage bridging and linking capital to disseminate information should pair awareness-raising with concrete coping resources, so that knowledge of climate risk does not arrive without tools for managing the emotional load. The authors frame their work as a step toward understanding the nuanced role of social capital in the mental health consequences of a changing climate, and as hurricanes grow more frequent and more intense in a warming world, that understanding is likely to become only more urgent. The study’s message is ultimately a sober one: the social fabric that communities depend on after disaster is neither armor nor amplifier by default, but a medium whose effects depend on how hard the storm has already hit.

Subject of Research: Associations between hurricane stressor exposure, three forms of social capital, and climate anxiety among survivors of Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Article Title: Associations between hurricane stressors, social capital, and climate anxiety among individuals who experienced Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Article References: Dalisay, F., Liu, W., Yamamoto, M., Chu, H., Hmielowski, J., Hong, Y.-R., Liu, J., & Johnson, B. K. (2026). Associations between hurricane stressors, social capital, and climate anxiety among individuals who experienced Hurricanes Helene and Milton. PLOS Mental Health, 3(10), e0000749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000749

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000749

Keywords: climate anxiety, hurricane stressors, social capital, bonding social capital, bridging social capital, linking social capital, Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton, disaster mental health, cross-sectional survey, PLOS Mental Health, extreme weather