“Eco-anxiety” and “climate-anxiety” are the most widely known terms describing what people feel in response to being aware of the climate crisis.

We conducted a review of published academic papers including original research articles and review papers, and found surprising results on how young people aged 10-29 years actually experience being aware of global warming and climate change and its effects.

While you might have experienced climate anxiety or know about it, you might not know what it is.

Researchers do not have agreed definitions. In the papers we examined as part of our study, eco-anxiety was defined 41 times and climate-anxiety defined 24 times.

The main inconsistency between definitions of eco-anxiety stems from the extent to which it is related to anxiety. Some definitions position eco-anxiety as an extension of generalised anxiety or as having characteristics of anxiety disorders. Whereas some do not actually mention anxiety at all in the definition and may instead use concepts like “concern or worry,” which muddies the conceptual waters.

Natural disasters versus human-made disasters

Another discrepancy is whether the definitions relate to just climate-related changes, or wider environmental changes, and whether or not the feelings relate to human-caused changes only.

Some definitions consider these terms to describe experiences coming from awareness of climate and ecological change, whereas others consider “eco” and climate-anxiety to be experienced in response to more direct climate........

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