The first study employed a cross-sectional design to assess associations between various cognitive strategies and climate outcomes. The sample consisted of 442 participants aged between 18 and 24 years, with 75.8 percent identifying as female. Researchers measured levels of rumination, catastrophising, positive refocusing, and refocus on planning. These cognitive variables were then analyzed in relation to self-reported climate anxiety and pro-environmental behaviour. This initial phase provided a baseline understanding of how different mental processes align with emotional responses to climate change and subsequent environmental actions.

Results from the cross-sectional study indicated that rumination emerged as the strongest correlate of climate anxiety. Participants who engaged more frequently in repetitive, negative thinking about climate issues reported higher levels of anxiety. Conversely, refocus on planning was identified as the strongest correlate of pro-environmental behaviour. This suggests that while dwelling on negative aspects of climate change is linked to distress, the act of planning may be associated with greater engagement in environmental activities. The distinction between these two cognitive strategies highlights the nuanced role of mental processing in climate-related psychology.

To test whether these associations could be leveraged for intervention, the second study was conducted as a randomised controlled trial. This phase involved 89 young adults, also aged 18 to 24, with a higher proportion of female participants at 92.1 percent. The trial compared three conditions: a control group, a group engaging in expressive writing, and a group combining expressive writing with planning exercises. The study assessed changes in climate anxiety, climate worry, pro-environmental behaviour or intentions, rumination, and planning across repeated measurements to determine the impact of these brief interventions.

The findings from the randomised controlled trial revealed that neither the expressive writing nor the combined writing and planning interventions led to significant long-term changes in the measured outcomes. Specifically, the interventions did not result in reduced climate anxiety or climate worry, nor did they increase pro-environmental behaviour or behavioural intentions. Furthermore, there were no significant changes in the levels of rumination or refocus on planning over time. This lack of effect suggests that brief, self-guided cognitive exercises may be insufficient to produce meaningful shifts in the complex relationship between climate distress and environmental action.

Despite the absence of long-term benefits, the study observed short-term effects immediately following the exercises. Both intervention groups experienced increases in climate worry in the immediate aftermath of the writing tasks. This transient rise in worry indicates that confronting climate-related thoughts through writing can temporarily heighten emotional distress. However, these short-term spikes did not translate into sustained improvements in well-being or behaviour, underscoring the limitations of simple writing exercises as a standalone therapeutic tool for climate anxiety.

Exploratory analyses provided additional insight into the dynamic relationship between cognitive strategies and emotional outcomes. The researchers found that increases in rumination, observed across all conditions including the control group, were associated with subsequent increases in climate anxiety and climate worry over time. This temporal association reinforces the link between repetitive negative thinking and the escalation of distress. It suggests that rumination may serve as a mechanism through which climate-related concerns intensify, potentially creating a cycle of increasing anxiety and worry.

The study’s conclusions highlight the complex interplay between cognitive emotion regulation and climate-related outcomes. Rumination appears to be a consistent correlate of climate distress, acting as a potential driver of anxiety and worry. On the other hand, planning seems to accompany both climate concern and pro-environmental engagement, suggesting a dual role in how young adults process and respond to environmental threats. The findings imply that effective interventions may need to target specific cognitive patterns more directly or employ more intensive methods than brief self-guided exercises.

These results contribute to the growing body of literature on the psychological impacts of climate change. By distinguishing between the detrimental effects of rumination and the potential benefits of planning, the study offers a more granular view of climate anxiety. The lack of efficacy for the brief interventions tested suggests that future research should explore more robust therapeutic approaches, possibly drawing from cognitive behavioural therapy principles, to help young adults manage climate distress without hindering their pro-environmental motivations. The study underscores the need for tailored strategies that address the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying climate-related psychological responses.

The research was partially funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, supporting the project on the prevalence and factors of climate anxiety among Slovenian youth. The authors emphasize that the findings are based on a specific population of young adults in Slovenia, and further research is needed to determine the generalizability of these results to other demographics and contexts. As climate change continues to pose significant challenges, understanding the psychological dimensions of this crisis remains crucial for developing effective support systems and fostering sustainable behavioural change.

Subject of Research: Psychology

Article Title: The role of rumination and planning in climate anxiety, worry, and pro-environmental behaviour among young adults: evidence from two studies

Article References: Smrke, U., Gračner, J., Zorjan, S., & Plohl, N. (2026). The role of rumination and planning in climate anxiety, worry, and pro-environmental behaviour among young adults: evidence from two studies. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05700-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05700-1

Keywords: Climate Anxiety, Rumination, Pro-environmental Behaviour, Cognitive Emotion Regulation, Young Adults, Randomised Controlled Trial, role, planning, climate, anxiety, worry, pro-environmental

The research team, led by Mallika Roy and Bablo Biswas, began with a broad Boolean search combining the terms ‘Horticulture’ or ‘Agriculture’ with ‘Education’ or ‘Training’, which initially retrieved 28,739 records. After filtering for English-language articles, reviews, book chapters, books and short surveys across subject areas including social sciences, agricultural and biological sciences, and environmental science, the final dataset settled at 1,476 publications. The authors then used the network visualisation software VOSviewer to construct maps of how publications, authors, countries and keywords relate to one another, complementing these quantitative networks with a qualitative thematic synthesis of the most highly cited studies.

The temporal trends alone tell a compelling story. Publication activity remained low and stable between 2000 and 2013, with fewer than 40 papers appearing each year. From 2014 onwards, output accelerated markedly, and the most dramatic surge came after 2019, with annual publications climbing from 85 in 2019 to 154 in 2024, the highest figure recorded in the entire study period. The researchers attribute this trajectory to rising global attention to sustainability, climate change adaptation, digital agriculture and capacity building, suggesting that agricultural education has become a strategic instrument for meeting international policy commitments rather than a niche academic pursuit.

Geographically, the collaboration networks reveal both the strength and the unevenness of the field. Of 102 countries meeting the analysis threshold, 99 formed a single connected network divided into 14 clusters, linked by 598 connections. The United States dominated with 362 documents and the highest total link strength of 205, indicating extensive international collaboration, followed by the United Kingdom with 99 documents and a link strength of 147. India and China, despite producing 115 and 107 documents respectively, showed comparatively fewer links and lower link strengths of 61 and 59, pointing to limited international integration despite high research output. The authors caution that total link strength can be inflated by publication volume, but the pattern nonetheless suggests that research activity remains concentrated in developed economies, leaving developing-country perspectives underrepresented in a field where sustainability challenges are often most acute.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis proved to be the study’s most revealing technique. Among 599 keywords that appeared at least five times, the term ‘agriculture’ dominated with 419 occurrences and a total link strength of 5,500, followed closely by ‘education’ with 267 occurrences. The analysis identified five dominant thematic clusters: sustainability; climate change and adaptation; education and capacity building; farmers’ behaviour and technology adoption; and pesticides, food safety and agricultural policy. A thematic map classifying these clusters by centrality and density showed that sustainability, sustainable development, conservation and urban agriculture occupy the influential ‘motor themes’ quadrant, alongside climate change, adaptation, resilience and climate-smart agriculture. Education and training themselves sat in the ‘basic and transversal’ quadrant, foundational and highly connected but theoretically underdeveloped, while biodiversity, pollinators and ecosystem services formed a mature but relatively isolated niche.

Perhaps the most provocative finding concerns what is missing. Although pro-environmental behaviour was initially identified as a key conceptual outcome of agricultural education, the bibliometric results showed that explicit behavioural constructs were largely absent from the field’s dominant vocabulary. The authors argue that while environmental stewardship and sustainable practices are frequently discussed, the mechanisms through which educational interventions actually change decision-making among farmers and supply chain stakeholders remain underexplored. This gap matters because the study’s theoretical framework, built on four complementary perspectives from sustainability education, environmental education theory, experiential learning theory and eco-efficiency theory, positions behaviour change as the critical link between classroom and field, between knowledge acquisition and measurable sustainability outcomes.

The thematic synthesis of highly cited publications grounded these abstractions in concrete global challenges. Two of the seven selected studies focused on pesticide knowledge and safety, drawing on research in Kuwait and Sri Lanka that documented significant gaps in farmers’ understanding of safe handling practices and the public health burden of pesticide poisoning. Another examined the barriers to adopting integrated pest management in developing countries, where limited technical knowledge, inadequate training, financial constraints and weak institutional support impede the transition away from chemical dependency. A study of drought-prone and groundwater-depleted regions of Bangladesh demonstrated that farmers’ adaptive responses to climate variability depend heavily on access to knowledge, training and institutional support, reinforcing the case for climate-resilient agricultural education.

The remaining themes extended the field’s reach into economics and ecology. An assessment of farming eco-efficiency using data envelopment analysis highlighted how resource optimisation can raise productivity without compromising environmental integrity, while an analysis of structural transformation in the United States underscored how agricultural development is inseparable from broader economic and social change. A landmark study on pollinator declines brought biodiversity into the frame, warning that the loss of pollinating species threatens both ecosystem functioning and the stability of food crop yields. Together, the authors contend, these interconnected themes demonstrate that education functions as a common enabling mechanism across domains that have traditionally been studied in isolation, from occupational health to conservation biology.

The publication landscape itself reflects the field’s interdisciplinary character. Sustainability, published in Switzerland, led in output with 47 documents and 847 citations, while Science of the Total Environment achieved the highest citation impact with 1,056 citations from only 16 papers. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, PLOS ONE and the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health also featured among the most productive outlets. In the co-citation network, the authors van der Hoek and Jallow emerged as the most influential figures, their work on pesticide poisoning and safety practices serving as foundational reference points that connect otherwise distinct research clusters, including studies of farmer safety behaviour in Nepal, Morocco and Pakistan.

Looking forward, the study proposes a conceptual framework and a set of research propositions linking education to knowledge development, pro-environmental behaviour and sustainability outcomes, while offering practical recommendations ranging from experiential learning through demonstration farms and farmer field schools to digital learning platforms, sustainability competency frameworks and stronger industry-university-government collaboration. The authors are careful to note the limitations of their approach: the analysis was restricted to Scopus and English-language publications, the deliberately broad search strategy may have captured studies in which education was only one component, and bibliometric patterns cannot establish causation. Yet the central message stands. As climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity intensify, the education of the people who grow the world’s food has evolved from a backwater of vocational training into a strategic frontier of sustainability science, and the evidence base for designing it well is only now beginning to take shape.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of sustainability-oriented agriculture and horticulture education research

Article Title: Mapping sustainability research, education and training in agriculture and horticulture

Article References: Roy, M., & Biswas, B. (2026). Mapping sustainability research, education and training in agriculture and horticulture. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1077. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02153-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02153-x

Keywords: agriculture, horticulture, sustainability, education, bibliometrics, climate change adaptation, pro-environmental behaviour, pesticide safety, biodiversity, capacity building, Scopus, VOSviewer

The research team set out to test a deceptively simple question: at the level of the individual, can personal well-being and pro-environmental behaviour be pursued in tandem? Both concepts are multidimensional. Subjective well-being, as the authors frame it, is not a single happiness score but a bundle of perceptions about one’s living conditions, spanning material circumstances, health, social relationships, and satisfaction with different life domains. Pro-environmental behaviour, likewise, covers a heterogeneous set of everyday practices, from waste sorting and reduced consumption to mobility choices and household energy habits. Treating either construct as a monolith, the authors argue, obscures the diversity of real lives.

To capture that diversity, the researchers built a unique dataset in October 2023, surveying 3,000 residents selected to be representative of the French population. The questionnaire tracked both environmental engagement and personal well-being, measuring each through multiple dimensions rather than summary indices. Respondents were recruited through a certified panel survey firm specialising in internationally recognised polling, with data collection compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation. Participants gave informed consent before completing the online questionnaire, and the dataset provided to the researchers was fully anonymised, containing no information that could identify individuals.

The methodological heart of the paper is a multivariate exploratory approach based on ClustGeo, an R package for hierarchical clustering that the authors had previously helped develop. What makes ClustGeo distinctive is its ability to vary the weight assigned to each set of variables while maintaining constant inertia, the statistical measure of dispersion that clustering algorithms seek to partition. In practical terms, this allowed the team to search for classes of individuals while controlling how strongly the well-being dimensions versus the behavioural dimensions shaped the resulting groups. Because perceived living conditions are likely to be influenced by population-level factors such as demographic, economic, and sanitary conditions, the researchers conducted a simulation that varied the respective weight of each set of dimensions and observed how the classification responded.

The central finding supports the hypothesis that heterogeneity among individuals drives the complexity of the association between subjective well-being and pro-environmental behaviour. Rather than one uniform relationship, the analysis revealed three distinct patterns linking the two domains: co-evolution, in which higher well-being and stronger environmental engagement appear together; disconnection, in which the two vary independently; and opposition, in which they diverge. In other words, some people are both satisfied with their lives and green in their habits, some are green without any apparent well-being dividend, and others occupy configurations where the two dimensions conflict. The authors’ pointed phrase, one size does not fit all, is not rhetorical flourish but a literal description of their statistical results.

The simulation added a further layer of nuance. When the researchers increased the weighting of subjective well-being relative to environmental behaviour, the association patterns reconfigured, and the way individual profiles were structured across the population shifted as well. This sensitivity analysis matters because it demonstrates that the apparent relationship between happiness and green behaviour is not a fixed property of the population but partly an artefact of how much analytical emphasis each dimension receives. The authors discuss the specific results for a higher weighting of subjective well-being, underscoring that perceived living conditions are themselves shaped by broader demographic, economic, and health contexts that vary across the population.

Why does this matter beyond the seminar room? A substantial body of prior research, including meta-analytic work, has reported a robust positive association between individuals’ pro-environmental behaviours and their subjective well-being, and this evidence has fed into policy arguments that green transitions need not cost personal happiness. The French study does not overturn that literature, but it reframes it. If the population contains co-evolving, disconnected, and opposed profiles, then an average positive correlation may conceal large groups for whom the relationship simply does not hold. Interventions designed on the assumption that greener behaviour automatically enhances well-being could therefore miss their mark for a substantial share of the public, or even backfire for those whose life circumstances place them in the opposition pattern.

The study also speaks to a long-running methodological debate. Previous work has questioned how strong the evidence for a well-being and behaviour link really is, noting mismatches between self-reported and observed pro-environmental behaviour and the influence of green self-image on survey responses. By refusing to collapse either construct into a single index, Kuentz and Boschet sidestep some of the aggregation problems that plague simpler analyses. Their clustering approach treats the multidimensionality of both well-being and behaviour as the object of study rather than a nuisance, revealing structure that correlation coefficients average away. The trade-off is that the resulting classes are exploratory rather than confirmatory, and the numbering of classes is an arbitrary output of the software rather than a ranking of importance.

Contextual factors in France make the findings particularly timely. National environmental assessments and international surveys document mounting concern about climate change among the French public, alongside persistent tensions around mobility habits and the cost of living. Perceived living conditions, the study reminds us, are embedded in these wider conditions. A household facing economic strain may experience well-being and environmental engagement very differently from a comfortable urban professional, even if both report similar attitudes toward the environment. The simulation results suggest that as demographic, economic, and sanitary conditions shift, the very architecture of the well-being and behaviour relationship may reorganise, meaning that snapshots taken in one period may not generalise to the next.

For researchers, the message is methodological: multidimensional, person-centred approaches can uncover heterogeneity that variable-centred designs smooth over, and sensitivity analyses that vary the weighting of constructs should become standard practice in this field. For communicators and policymakers, the message is humbler: the happy-green synergy is real for some people, irrelevant for others, and inverted for a few. Understanding which profile a given community or demographic occupies could help tailor environmental policies that support, rather than strain, quality of life. The French case offers a template for asking these questions elsewhere, and its central lesson travels well: before assuming that one path leads simultaneously to personal happiness and planetary health, it is worth asking whose happiness, whose health, and whose path.

Subject of Research: The relationship between multidimensional subjective well-being and pro-environmental behaviour in France

Article Title: ‘One Size Does Not Fit All’: When Subjective Well-Being Reflects Distinct Situations in the Adoption of Pro-Environmental Behaviour. The Case of France

Article References: Kuentz, V., & Boschet, C. (2026). ‘One Size Does Not Fit All’: When Subjective Well-Being Reflects Distinct Situations in the Adoption of Pro-Environmental Behaviour. The Case of France. Social Indicators Research, 184(3), Article 49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03936-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03936-3

Keywords: subjective well-being, pro-environmental behaviour, France, clustering analysis, ClustGeo, survey research, life satisfaction, environmental psychology, multidimensionality, individual profiles, Social Indicators Research, sustainability