Eco-Anxiety

Why the coining of eco-anxiety is disputed

The article carrying most of this material states in its opening paragraph that eco-anxiety was invented by Véronique Lepaige, a French public health researcher, in 1997. Its definition section then states that the term is said to have been coined by Glenn Albrecht, who defined it as a chronic fear of environmental doom.

Both claims sit in the same article and neither is qualified with reference to the other. That is a small thing and it is characteristic: the vocabulary here arrived quickly, from several directions, and the record of who said what first has not settled.

What the eco-anxiety surveys actually measured

The figures are unusually plentiful for a term this new, and they measure different things.

In 2018, surveys in the United States found between twenty-one and twenty-nine per cent of Americans described themselves as very worried about the climate, double the rate found in a comparable study three years earlier. A survey of ten thousand young people across ten countries in September 2021 found almost sixty per cent very or extremely worried, two thirds reporting sadness, fear and anxiety, and close to forty per cent hesitant about having children. A United Kingdom poll in October 2021 found seventy-eight per cent reporting some degree of eco-anxiety, with high levels reported by forty-five per cent of women against thirty-six per cent of men. In some universities in 2021, more than seventy per cent of students described themselves as having it.

None of those is a prevalence rate in the sense the rest of this catalogue uses, and the literature says so directly: as of early 2021, validated ways to assess how common climate or ecological anxiety is were not well established. A number produced by asking people whether a word applies to them is a different quantity from a number produced by a diagnostic instrument, and here only the first kind exists.

How climate anxiety shapes the decision to have children

The most concrete behaviour attached to eco-anxiety is a decision not to have children. A New York Times survey in 2018 found that thirty-three per cent of women who had chosen not to have children gave climate change as a reason, and the 2021 international survey found close to forty per cent of young people hesitant.

The literature complicates that rather than repeating it. In places where climate disruption damages farming, families may have more children rather than fewer, to secure labour, which means the same pressure produces opposite decisions depending on where a person is standing. Jade Sasser's Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, published in 2024, argues that the question is harder again for racialised communities, who are both more exposed to climate harm and less served by the way the debate is framed.

Which groups report the most eco-anxiety

Three groups recur. Young people, whose eco-anxiety has been likened to the fear of nuclear annihilation among an earlier generation. Women, whose higher rates are attributed in the literature to structural inequality rather than to disposition: unequal access to power, information and money, and climate stressors that lengthen the work of securing water, food and fuel. A 2023 study attributes part of the difference to the fact that eighty per cent of climate migrants are women.

Indigenous populations are the third, and the mechanism named is specific rather than general: livelihoods and wellbeing tied to land, and therefore directly exposed to species loss, drought and erratic weather. A 2021 study found that group most likely to report reduced mental wellbeing, expressed as eco-anxiety and also as eco-anger.

What eco-anxiety does to sleep and appetite

The reported symptoms are those of generalised anxiety:

• irritability
• sleeplessness
• inability to relax
• loss of appetite
• poor concentration
• muscle tension
• panic attacks

A 2022 study commissioned by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine reported that anxieties about climate change and environmental issues caused insomnia for seventy per cent of Americans, which is a very large number for a specific cause and is quoted here as it was published.

How climate research itself adds to eco-anxiety

The most unusual claim in the material is that the research itself contributes to the condition. Where researchers present climate evidence without considering that solutions exist or that individual action matters, they add to the sense of powerlessness that eco-anxiety consists of. Climate change helplessness is named as a form of learned helplessness, and belief in the effectiveness of one's own actions is what it is set against.

That is a claim about scientific communication rather than about psychology, and it has no analogue anywhere else in this catalogue. No article about spiders is accused of causing arachnophobia.

Why calling eco-anxiety rational does not make it costless

The position that eco-anxiety is rational does not make it costless, and the literature holds both. Severe instances are described as having a mental health impact where nothing relieves them. Individualistic models of mental health are described as not designed for collective trauma on a planetary scale, which is a statement about the limits of the clinic rather than about the people in it.