Teen Climate Anxiety in Spain Reveals a Surprising Gap Between Worry and Action

Climate change is often framed as a physical problem — rising temperatures, shrinking aquifers, longer droughts — but for the generation that will inherit its consequences, it is increasingly an emotional one. A new study of 780 adolescents in Castilla-La Mancha, a sparsely populated region of central Spain, offers one of the most granular portraits yet of how eco-anxiety takes hold in young minds, and why feeling worried about the planet does not automatically translate into doing something about it. The research, published in the journal Regional Environmental Change, was led by Cristian Soria, Pablo Olivos-Jara, Nuria Gómez and Marina Sánchez-Serrano of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, and it arrives at a moment when public health authorities worldwide are beginning to treat the psychological toll of climate change as seriously as its physical effects.

The concept at the heart of the study is eco-anxiety: the chronic emotional distress that arises from concern about climate change and environmental degradation. Unlike a clinical phobia, eco-anxiety is generally understood as a rational response to a real threat, but its intensity varies enormously from person to person, and its relationship to behavior has proven stubbornly difficult to pin down. Earlier work, including the development of the Hogg eco-anxiety scale and the climate change anxiety measure by Susan Clayton and Bryan Karazsia, has established that eco-anxiety is multidimensional, encompassing affective symptoms, rumination, behavioral disruption and anxiety about one’s own ecological impact. What has remained unclear is how these feelings map onto the everyday, consumption-related choices that ultimately determine an individual’s carbon footprint.

To probe that connection, the Castilla-La Mancha team applied a deliberately multidimensional framework. They surveyed adolescents across the region and measured not only eco-anxiety but also a battery of socioeconomic and sociodemographic characteristics, psychosocial variables — most importantly, the degree to which respondents include nature in their sense of self — and pro-environmental behaviors defined as consumption-related practices with measurable climate change mitigation potential. The analytical toolkit combined multiple linear regression, which allowed the researchers to isolate the independent contribution of each factor to eco-anxiety scores, with correspondence analyses, a technique well suited to uncovering behavioral profiles and associations among categorical variables.

The regression results are striking in their clarity. Eco-anxiety was significantly associated with sociodemographic variables, most notably gender, echoing a broad international literature showing that girls and young women consistently report higher levels of climate concern and climate-related distress than their male peers. It was also strongly linked to connection with nature: adolescents who described themselves as psychologically intertwined with the natural world — a construct operationalized through measures of inclusion of nature in the self, following the connectedness-to-n tradition pioneered by F. Stephan Mayer and Cynthia McPherson Frantz — reported markedly higher eco-anxiety. In other words, the more a teenager sees nature as part of who they are, the more they suffer when that nature appears threatened.

But the study’s most consequential finding concerns behavior, and it cuts against the intuitive assumption that anxiety and action go hand in hand. The researchers found a sharp divergence between two facets of pro-environmental engagement. Adolescents who actually performed mitigation-related practices — the concrete, consumption-linked behaviors that carry genuine climate mitigation potential — reported lower levels of eco-anxiety. Adolescents who expressed a strong willingness to act but had not yet converted that intention into practice reported higher eco-anxiety. Actual mitigation, in short, appears to soothe; mere willingness appears to gnaw. The authors interpret this as evidence of a psychological gap between intention and action, in which unresolved intention becomes itself a source of distress, while completed behavior restores a sense of agency and coherence.

Using the correspondence analysis, the team identified four distinct behavioral profiles among the adolescents, and each tells a different story about environmental commitment in the climate crisis era. The first group, labeled “involved,” combines high eco-anxiety with strong behavioral engagement — young people who worry intensely and act accordingly. The second, “content,” consists of adolescents who appear satisfied with their current behaviors, achieving a kind of equilibrium between effort and reassurance. The third, “willing,” is the group that embodies the intention-action gap: high willingness, unresolved distress, limited actual practice. The fourth, “disengaged,” shows both low engagement and low eco-anxiety — teenagers who are neither acting nor particularly worried, a pattern the authors implicitly flag as fragile, because it may reflect psychological distancing from a problem that will not go away.

This four-profile typology matters because it demonstrates that pro-environmental commitment cannot be captured by any single indicator. A survey that asked only “how willing are you to act?” would conflate the involved and willing groups, treating a teenagers’ stated intentions as equivalent to their lived behavior. A survey that measured only current behavior would miss the distress brewing in the willing group. By examining patterns rather than points, the Castilla-La Mancha researchers reveal a heterogeneous landscape in which adolescents occupy qualitatively different relationships to the climate crisis — some anxious and active, some anxious and frozen, some calm and committed, some simply absent from the conversation.

The regional setting lends the findings particular weight. Castilla-La Mancha is one of Spain’s most depopulated regions, a territory of dispersed settlements and long travel distances whose per-capita carbon footprint has been the subject of sustained economic research by the same university community, including analyses of household emissions, carbon taxation vulnerability and the so-called “empty Spain.” Previous work by co-authors affiliated with the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha has documented gender differences in household carbon footprints in Spain and quantified the mitigation potential of consumption options across European contexts. Placing adolescent eco-anxiety within this regional economic reality connects the psychological to the material: young people in rural and semi-rural Spain are forming their environmental identities in a place where low-carbon living is structurally harder, not easier.

The study also carries practical implications for educators, clinicians and policymakers. If willingness without action is itself a driver of distress, then environmental education that stops at raising awareness may inadvertently intensify eco-anxiety rather than relieve it. The findings suggest that interventions should be designed to help adolescents close the intention-action gap — providing concrete, achievable mitigation practices that convert worry into efficacy. Conversely, the low-anxiety, low-engagement disengaged profile warns against complacency: silence about climate is not the same as resilience. The authors note that their survey data contain sensitive information and can be shared only under well-founded request and after anonymization, underscoring the care required when researching minors’ mental health. The work was funded by the Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha and approved by the university’s Social Research Ethics Committee.

As climate change accelerates, the inner lives of adolescents are becoming a legitimate barometer of the crisis. This study shows that barometer is reading high in some quarters, low in others, and that the relationship between what young people feel and what they do is neither simple nor stable. Eco-anxiety, the research suggests, is not a fixed pathology but a signal — amplified by connection to nature and by unfulfilled intentions, dampened by real action — and understanding its behavioral geography among the young may prove essential to sustaining both their mental health and the environmental commitment the coming decades will demand of them.

Subject of Research: Eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behavior among adolescents in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Article Title: Adolescents in the climate crisis: Eco-anxiety and the fragility of environmental commitment in Castilla-La Mancha

Article References: Soria, C., Olivos-Jara, P., Gómez, N., & Sánchez-Serrano, M. (2026). Adolescents in the climate crisis: Eco-anxiety and the fragility of environmental commitment in Castilla-La Mancha. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02678-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02678-9

Keywords: eco-anxiety, adolescents, climate change, pro-environmental behavior, Castilla-La Mancha, connection with nature, mitigation, environmental psychology, behavioral profiles, carbon footprint, gender differences, Spain