Climate Anxiety
and Social Media
For many young people, their understanding of climate change is shaped by various sources of digital and social media.
As coverage of the climate crisis has become more mainstream, access to information about climate change and insights into the impacts on people and species across the world has been growing.
When people hear about climate change and its impacts, feelings of worry, fear and climate anxiety are natural and rational responses, particularly when young people perceive that those in power are not doing enough to change things. For these reasons, feelings of climate anxiety and worry about the implications for future generations have also been growing.
Climate anxiety affects people differently. Often, those living on the front line of climate change feel climate anxiety most acutely. For example, “a study of 10,000 people aged 16-25 revealed 92% in The Philippines feel that the future is frightening, compared to 56% in Finland”.
Social media is a tool which can be used positively to share information, express opinions, connect different groups of people across the world and to mobilise people to respond to the climate crisis. Social media played a huge part in helping to connect online and offline activism as part of the youth climate strikes and Fridays for Future movement in 2018. Yet social media is not without its risks, some young people may find themselves in groups or spaces where either climate scepticism or climate despair thrive. Therefore, climate education should include the development of discernment and criticality over the information that can be shared on digital and social media platforms.
Case Study: Key Stage 3
Reducing Anxiety Through
Appropriate Pedagogy
Climate education has been shown to reduce climate anxiety when it actively inspires children and young people to be agents for change, when critical emotional awareness is included in the climate curriculum, when transformative learning pedagogies are used to stimulate a deep, ‘third-order’ learning that causes the learner to reconstruct their values, attitudes and behaviours and when time and spaces are provided for nature connection to support well-being for all.
