Climate change is a (if not the) signature threat of our time, along with AI, overpopulation, and several others1—both materially and existentially. Hardly a day goes by during which we do not read about an unprecedented weather crisis. It’s not unusual to notice oddities in the weather, compared to what we remember (for those of us old enough to recall "normal winters").

Moreover, so many of us have been directly affected1, by power outages, flooding, unprecedented heat, and an array of other “extreme weather events”. Our vocabulary has likewise expanded to include terms like “atmospheric river”, conjuring vague images of dangerous aqueous reservoirs winding their way through the skies like celestial dragons.

Climate change, including extreme heat, pollution, and other factors, is also associated with increased mental and physical health problems, and increased mortality, not to mention human displacement, mass extinction, and the inadvertent resculpting of geography itself, as ice melts, waters rise, and shorelines recede.

Researchers Veijonaho, Ojala, Hietajärvi and Salmela-Aro (2024), building upon prior work, conducted an analysis of climate attitudes and well-being across the span of a year. They focused on adolescents aged 11 to 15, with data collected from a total group of over 3,000 teens in 2020 and a year later, in 2021.

Veijonaho and colleagues had previously identified several core factors including climate distress—”eco-anxiety”, or “climate anxiety”—with cognitive/emotional and behavioral components, noting that a subset of people, when faced with climate crisis, may experience emotional exhaustion and feelings of inadequacy, for example they may feel burned out or experience helplessness and hopelessness, or feel they need to do something to save the world but don’t see a way to contribute.

Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) is another important variable: Under what conditions do people do what they can meaningfully do? Climate distress is a rational response to real threats, and the way that people respond can be more or less useful and adaptive and associated with greater or lesser well-being.

Study participants therefore completed measures of climate-change distress and measure of climate-change-connected emotional exhaustion and inadequacy; climate denialism; a........

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