Climate worry and anxiety differ across 32 countries, affecting wellbeing

A sweeping international study covering 32 countries has found that two of the most frequently used terms in climate psychology, “climate change worry” and “climate anxiety,” are not the same thing, and that conflating them may be obscuring which emotional responses genuinely harm mental wellbeing. The research, published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, analyzed survey responses from 12,246 people and discovered that while both constructs relate to how people emotionally process the climate crisis, they differ sharply in their psychological consequences and their underlying cognitive mechanisms.

The distinction matters because researchers, journalists, and policymakers have long treated worry about climate change and anxiety about climate change as interchangeable labels for the same phenomenon. Survey headlines frequently announce that “X percent of people are worried about climate change,” while other reports cite rising rates of “climate anxiety” without clarifying whether these refer to the same underlying emotional state. According to the new findings, they do not. The study, led by Eun Hee Lee of the University of Nottingham Malaysia alongside Charles Adedayo Ogunbode of the University of Nottingham and an international team spanning institutions from Norway to Nigeria, provides some of the first direct empirical evidence that these are meaningfully different psychological experiences with different implications for public mental health.

At the heart of the distinction lies a well-established framework from psychology that separates worry from anxiety as fundamentally different responses to perceived threat. Worry, in the psychological literature, is a primarily cognitive phenomenon, a verbal-linguistic, thought-based process in which a person consciously considers potential dangers, evaluates their likely consequences, and mentally prepares possible solutions. It engages what researchers call the conscious defense system, a set of higher-order cognitive processes activated when basic threat-detection mechanisms flag potential danger. In this sense, worry about climate change functions as an early stage of coping: a mental effort to engage with a problem, assess risks, and think through what might be done. People who worry about climate change are often thinking concretely about harms to themselves, their loved ones, future generations, people in economically disadvantaged countries, and the natural world.

Anxiety, by contrast, is fundamentally affective. It involves heightened physiological arousal, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, and a persistent sense of unease in anticipation of uncertain or threatening events. Unlike fear, which is an immediate, short-lived response to a specific and proximal threat, anxiety is a broader and more diffuse emotional state. It is linked to the behavioral inhibition system, a neurobiological mechanism that automatically detects potential threats and prompts individuals to halt or avoid action rather than pursue goal-directed behavior. While anxiety can trigger secondary cognitive processes that help evaluate perceived threats, it remains largely rooted in emotional reactivity rather than deliberate thought. When overactive, it can contribute to chronic unease, avoidance, and hypersensitivity to perceived danger.

The research team operationalized climate anxiety as “state climate anxiety,” a construct developed in earlier cross-national work by Ogunbode and colleagues. State climate anxiety captures the immediate intensity of negative emotional responses to climate change, without incorporating the functional-impairment symptoms that clinically oriented measures include. Participants were asked to focus on their feelings about climate change in the moment and then rate how calm, tense, relaxed, anxious, peaceful, worried, or terrified they felt about it, using a five-point scale with the positive items reverse-scored. Climate change worry, meanwhile, was measured with a five-item scale assessing how worried participants were about the adverse effects of climate change on themselves, their loved ones, future generations, people in poorer countries, and animals or nature. Wellbeing was assessed with two standard instruments: the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index, which measures the frequency of positive feelings such as calm, energy, and waking refreshed over the preceding two weeks, and a single-item measure of overall life satisfaction.

The surveys were administered between 2019 and 2022 to university-based samples across 32 countries, with participants recruited through research pools and opportunity sampling among students. The pooled sample was 63.9 percent women and 32.7 percent men, with a mean age of 23.1 years. Ethical clearance was obtained from De Montfort University, with additional approvals secured in individual countries where required.

To compare the two constructs within a single analytical framework, the researchers used a statistical approach designed for dependent correlations, correlations computed from the same sample that share a common variable. They calculated Pearson correlations between each climate-emotion measure and each wellbeing indicator, then formally tested whether the two correlations differed significantly in magnitude using Steiger’s Z-test for comparing elements of a correlation matrix. Confidence intervals for the differences were computed using Zou’s 2007 method, which provides more accurate coverage than approaches based solely on Fisher’s z transformation. All analyses were conducted in R using the cocor package, and the data and analysis code were made publicly available on the Open Science Framework.

The results were striking. In the pooled sample, state climate anxiety showed a correlation of −0.24 with the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index, while climate change worry showed a correlation of just −0.05. The difference between these correlations was statistically significant, with a delta of −0.19 and a confidence interval that excluded zero by a wide margin, and the corresponding z statistic of −20.45 reflected an overwhelmingly reliable difference. A parallel pattern emerged for life satisfaction: state climate anxiety correlated at −0.17 with life satisfaction, compared with a negligible −0.02 for climate change worry, a difference that was again highly significant. In practical terms, anxiety about climate change was roughly four to eight times more strongly associated with diminished wellbeing than mere worry about it.

The cross-national breakdown reinforced the picture. State climate anxiety correlated significantly and negatively with the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index in 87.5 percent of the country samples, whereas climate change worry did so in only 18.8 percent. For life satisfaction, state climate anxiety showed significant negative correlations in 75.0 percent of countries, compared with 28.1 percent for worry. Even the relationship between the two climate-emotion constructs themselves varied enormously across countries: shared variance between worry and state climate anxiety ranged from a low of 1.2 percent in Egypt to a high of 47 percent in Finland. This wide spread suggests that in many national contexts the two constructs capture substantially distinct aspects of how people respond emotionally to climate change, and that cultural, linguistic, or social-normative factors may shape how these experiences are reported and interpreted.

The authors emphasize that their findings do not mean worry about climate change is psychologically irrelevant. Previous research has shown that worry can be associated with negative affect and reduced wellbeing, but also that it can be constructive. A recent study found that eco-worry was positively associated with life satisfaction, mediated by individuals’ willingness to engage in pro-environmental behavior, consistent with the view that worry can support a sense of agency and alignment with prosocial values. Anxiety, by contrast, has been more consistently linked in prior studies to depression, general anxiety, psychological distress, and insomnia symptoms. One study of 433 Filipino young adults found climate anxiety associated with greater psychological distress, including symptoms of anxiety, depression, and loss of emotional control, though not with positive wellbeing indicators such as life satisfaction.

For policymakers and climate communicators, the implications are significant. If the emotional tone of climate messaging amplifies anxiety rather than fostering constructive worry, it may inadvertently undermine public wellbeing, and possibly even climate action itself. The authors cite evidence that climate-related distress is negatively associated with environmentally friendly behaviors, suggesting that emotional overwhelm may coincide with reduced behavioral engagement. They argue that climate anxiety should be treated as a plausible public wellbeing risk warranting targeted strategies, including integrating psychosocial support and mental health resources into climate adaptation and communication initiatives, and improving public access to evidence-based coping resources.

The researchers are careful to acknowledge the limits of their design. The study is correlational, so it cannot establish whether climate anxiety causes poorer wellbeing or whether negative emotional responses to climate change are instead symptoms of pre-existing psychological vulnerabilities. Longitudinal evidence on causality remains mixed: one study provides partial support for a causal link between climate concern and mental health outcomes, while another found no causal relationship among young adults in the United Kingdom. The sample was predominantly young adults, a demographic particularly attuned to social norms surrounding climate change and potentially more susceptible to socially desirable responding, though the authors note that such bias would not straightforwardly explain the differential associations observed between the two constructs, since both would presumably be subject to similar reporting pressures. Unmeasured sociodemographic factors such as gender and income may also partially confound the observed relationships.

What the study offers, ultimately, is a conceptual and empirical foundation for a more precise science of climate emotions. By demonstrating that worry and anxiety are empirically distinguishable, that they vary independently across cultures, and that they carry very different weights in relation to mental wellbeing and life satisfaction, the research argues for treating them as separate constructs in future studies rather than collapsing them under a single label. Approaches that foster constructive concern without amplifying anxiety, the authors conclude, may be most conducive both to sustained climate engagement and to psychological resilience as climate impacts intensify.