More and more, climate change is taking a toll not only on communities, the environment, and the economy, but also on human minds. In recent years, researchers have been describing what they variously label eco-distress, exo-anxiety, or even eco-grief—a suite of symptoms including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder—linked to experiencing severe weather events or simply living in a world in which climate change is becoming a growing crisis.
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Whatever name the phenomenon goes by, it spares no one; simply by dint of being exposed to a warming world, you have cause to feel distress about it. Last year was the warmest one on record, edging out 2023, which had briefly held the number one spot. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2014. Extreme weather and other disasters linked to climate change—including wildfires, droughts, floods, and hurricanes—are all on the rise.
Experts are finding, however, that one demographic may suffer more than others: young people. A recent flurry of papers has documented significant and growing levels of climate anxiety in the 25-and-under group, with even preschoolers sometimes showing symptoms.
“You come across it in children as young as three,” says Elizabeth Haase, a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. “You find them on TikTok, sobbing about losing their teddy bears or sobbing that animals they loved got killed” in an extreme weather event.
Now, researchers in peer-reviewed studies are putting empirical meat on those anecdotal bones. In one April 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists surveyed nearly 3,000 young people in the U.S. aged 16-to-24 and found that approximately 20% of them were afraid to have children—worrying about bringing a new generation into a steadily warming world. That figure jumped to over 30% among young people who had experienced a severe-weather event first hand.
An earlier 2021 study in The Lancet surveyed 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries, and came up with even more concerning results. Overall, nearly 60% of respondents described themselves as very or extremely worried about climate change and nearly 85% were at least moderately concerned. More than 45% of the total said that those feelings adversely affected their daily functioning. Fully 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they believe the adults in charge have failed to take care of the planet—leaving the problem to the generations to follow.
“I think it’s different for young people,” said one 16-year-old cited in the study. “For us, the destruction of the planet is personal.”
“It’s the people who have contributed the least to the problem who are facing the challenge of dealing with the consequences,” says Emma Lawrance, Climate Care Center lead at Imperial College London and a co-author of the PNAS paper. “They’ve been let down by the adults who were supposed to keep them safe.”
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If kids are being hit especially hard by the ravages of climate change it’s in part because of one of the great gifts of youth—a nimble, pliable, very plastic brain. That can be handy when it comes to learning new things and acquiring new skills, but it carries a potential price in mental health, because a nimble brain is also an impressionable one. According to Lawrance, the large majority of mental health problems—up to 75%—begin before the age of 24. The 2021 Lancet study surveyed its 10,000 subjects on a whole range of emotional metrics and found that they were indeed being hit hard—and early in life—by climate-related distress. Two-thirds of them reported that they were feeling sadness related to climate change; nearly 51% described themselves as feeling helpless; 62% were anxious; 67% were afraid; and just 31% said they were optimistic that the climate problem could be solved. Significantly, another 57% said they were angry over the mess the world has become.
“We see kids having more reactive or situational depression,” says Haase. That is the type of depression that arises—sometimes quite rationally—from a current set of problems or circumstances, and is different from endogenous, or persistent, free-floating depression.
Looking further into the downstream effect of climate trauma, one 2024 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports surveyed nearly 39,000 high school students living in 22 urban public-school districts in the U.S., to determine how they were faring emotionally two years, five years, and 10 years after a severe weather event or disaster. Overall, those 22 districts endured a total of 83 federally declared climate-related disasters in the decade leading up to the study. The investigators were looking for signs of mental distress, defined as feeling prolonged sadness or hopelessness or suffering from short sleep duration. Across the sample group, they found that the young people who had experienced the highest number of disasters had a 25% greater rate of mental distress when they were exposed to a disaster within the previous two years, and a 20% higher rate at five years. There was no significant difference when the disaster took place 10 years in the past.
“We were alarmed to find that climate-related disasters already were affecting so many teens in the U.S.,” says Amy Auchincloss, associate professor of epidemiology at Drexel University School of Public Health and the lead author of the paper. “Disasters can upend adolescents’ lives for extended periods, for example [by] interrupting school and social and physical support services. And their family’s material circumstances could worsen.”
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Some of the distress young people experience can be either ameliorated or exacerbated by the people around them, especially adults, when the kids seek to talk about their climate anxiety. A 2024 paper in The Lancet surveyed nearly 16,000 young people in all 50 states and asked them, among other things, about the perceived and desired responses they got when they tried to give voice to their feelings. Nearly 62% reported that they at least tried to talk to others about climate change, and nearly 58% said they felt ignored or dismissed. Over 70% said they wished others would be more open to discussing the problem, and over 66% said they wanted their parents’ and grandparents’ generations to understand their feelings.
“One of the things that’s very damaging to children across the spectrum on any issue is invalidation,” says Haase, who was not involved in the study. “A child expresses a profound emotion and the parent dismisses it or shows contempt for it; this is very damaging in a global psychological way.”
Listening is not the only way adults can help the young people in their lives cope better. For those kids who are already receiving psychological counseling or considering it, Haase urges therapists to work in what she describes as a “climate-aware” way. “I think we really need to know exactly what therapeutic techniques are going to help most,” she says. “There is not [yet] a manual or developed psychotherapy for working with youth with climate distress.”
Helping kids find a better balance between fretting about the future and remaining hopeful about it can also be a powerful tool. “How do they sit with some of those difficult emotions?” Haase says. “How do they have space for those challenging emotions but also look to a future that they want and that there is still so much to be joyful about?” It is up to adults to help kids find that middle road. Auchincloss also stresses the particular importance of practicing these interventions in lower-wealth communities that often get hit harder by climate-related disasters, such as flood-prone regions in the developing world or city centers that suffer from urban heat islands in the summer.
Read more: How Extreme Heat Impacts Your Brain and Mental Health
If there is anything good that can come from all of this distress it’s that a worried or anxious or angry person can become a very motivated person, taking action through public protests or boycotts or reducing carbon use or simply voting out politicians who are resistant to taking climate action.
“Many young people have channeled their despair into action and become world leaders in the movement to preserve a livable climate,” says Auchincloss. “They have been calling for a radical re-envisioning of business-as-usual.” A problem not of the children’s making will require—unjustly—a generation of activists to set the world to rights.