Climate change is already having an effect... On our mental wellbeing

People's growing anxiety about the future of the planet is becoming increasingly obvious, but it's not an entirely bad thing

- By  Julia Shaw

How worried are you about environmental issues? If thinking about climate change and biodiversity loss stresses you out, you're not alone.

Psychologists are trying to understand this feeling referred to as eco-anxiety and they're finding that this worry may be essential for our fight to save the planet.

In late 2021, Australian applied psychologist Teaghan Hogg and colleagues proposed a new scale to help us measure eco-anxiety: the Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale. It uses 13 questions to capture our complex feelings about the environment.

The scale asks about negative emotions like feeling nervous, on edge or afraid about environmental issues, including global warming, ecological degradation, resource depletion, species extinction, the hole in the ozone layer, pollution of the oceans and deforestation. The scale also measures whether we ruminate on these issues, to see if we're unable to stop thinking about climate change or losses to the environment.

It also asks how these thoughts and feelings change our behaviour, such as whether they lead to difficulty sleeping, working or enjoying social situations, and how responsible we feel for the crises we're facing - for instance, whether we feel anxious about the problems our personal behaviours are causing for the planet, or that our individual actions will do little to solve them.