When it comes to climate change and their fears that international leaders would fail to address the crisis, young people say that they feel overwhelmed, depressed, and guilty.
Research has piled up in an attempt to quantify the presence of climate anxiety ahead of the United Nations climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow, which begins at the end of the month to hammer out how to bring the Paris Agreement of 2015, on mitigating climate change, into action.
Avaaz, an online campaign network, funded one of the largest investigations to date, which was led by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, polled 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 in ten countries. It released its findings in September.
It revealed that nearly three-quarters of those polled thought that the future was terrifying and that a lack of action by governments and industry had left 45 percent of those polled experiencing climate anxiety and anguish, which had an impact on their everyday lives and functioning.
Elouise Mayall, a member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition and an ecology student at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, told Reuters that she felt terrible and overwhelmed.
She said that she would be possibly left with a sense of shame on the thought that, how can she still want wonderful things when the world is dying and she doesn’t even know if she would be able to grow old in a safe world. She expressed a range of feelings that were at odds with one another.
Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Bath, is one of the co-authors of the September study who helps young people to manage their climate related emotions and anxieties.
She explained that the youth is growing up with sadness, dread, and uncertainty about their future. Extreme weather disasters can also produce problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder among some of the world’s most disadvantaged communities.
Greta Thunberg, a leading young Swedish climate campaigner, has suffered from severe climate anxiety previously.
Hickman explained that it was a natural response towards the uncertainty and lack of hope when young people think about their future amid the rapidly accelerating climate disasters.
She added that no one cares about what was happening in the world and it was only human to feel the way that the youth felt about their future.
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