Community, conversation, music: How people are tackling eco-anxiety around the world

Matt usually loves a rainy, cool day in the springtime. But when that weather hit on one recent day in Brooklyn, New York, it struck him differently.

“It just makes me extra concerned,” said Matt, who asked to go by his first name only, citing privacy concerns. “I [think] about the drought and the wildfires and, like — is the ground even going to be able to absorb all this water to help mitigate these things?”

Matt is a volunteer leader of a type of gathering called “climate cafés,” where people talk about how climate change impacts their lives. Attendees often share their anxieties and fears about the future without the pressure of finding a solution.

At this climate café, a small group of people sat in a circle drinking tea and eating popcorn.

“In all my actions throughout the day, there’s this undercurrent of grief that’s saying, ‘What’s going to happen in five years? Is this going to be here?’” said Benny, another person in the group.

“The beauty of a climate café is that it can really be anywhere in the world,” said Janine Walker, who hosted one such gathering at a university in central Vietnam. “It can be in your house, it can be in your backyard, it can be at the library. So, there’s no one way to have a climate café.”

Walker works for an environmental nonprofit called Force of Nature, which has hosted nearly 200 climate cafés everywhere from Svalbard, Norway, to Melbourne, Australia. For her, the community element of the cafés is crucial.

“We live in a time of doom-scrolling and people are very much spreading information about, ‘It’s too late, we’ve surpassed the temperature of no return,’” Walker told The World. “And it can just feel like a very isolating situation.”

Studies show that eco-anxiety — distress about climate change and its impacts on the landscape and human existence — has been on the rise for years. That makes a lot of sense to Britt Wray. She researches the intersection of climate change and mental health at Stanford University and wrote a book on the topic: “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety.”

“We’re dealing with a lot of loss, we’re dealing with places becoming uninhabitable,” Wray explained. “So, to feel some distress is a sign of our care and our love for all that is in harm’s way.”

Just like in other areas of life, Wray added, it’s important to pay attention to these emotions rather than suppressing them. “If we are not mindful about how these emotions show up in our lives, we can potentially be trapped by them. We can actually have our agency be thwarted,” she said.

While eco-anxiety and climate anxiety can be serious, Wray said they’re not pathological or listed in the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), so a health professional can’t diagnose someone with eco-anxiety the same way they can diagnose someone with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

“In most cases, [eco-anxiety] is sub-clinical and it is simply a human experience of moving through some distressing thoughts and feelings,” she said. “They don’t need to be dismissed with a pill or given a diagnosis.”

Instead, Wray believes the feelings need to be acknowledged and validated.

And people around the world are coming up with a variety of creative ways to do that.

The climate café in Brooklyn includes a broad array of add-ons to their conversations, including sound baths, clothing swaps, meditations and creating art. Sometimes they also sing folk songs focused on climate, like Pete Seeger’s “Sailing Up, Sailing Down” and John Prine’s “Paradise.”

“I’ve done things where you scream and let things out, right? I think it’s in a similar vein because the songs are climate-focused obviously,” said Matt, one attendee at a recent climate cafe folk jam. “And it’s usually optimistic, right? It’s not doom and gloom, which so much of climate is, and rightfully so. But it’s nice to be able to have that experience and end on a positive note, too.”

Another initiative is the Climate Crisis Hotline (1-833-EMO-4ECO) which was created in 2020 by Creative Migration and the design collective Space Saloon.

“The hotline offered a safe, anonymous space for people to express feelings of eco-anxiety, solastalgia [the emotional distress caused by environmental change, particularly when it affects someone’s home] and climate grief,” according to a briefing on the project. “It operated as both a public archive and a participatory platform for emotional expression during a time of widespread isolation.”

Although the hotline is no longer active, organizers say it proved “cultural institutions and artists can respond to the climate crisis, not only with facts or activism, but with spaces to feel. As a creative framework, it remains adaptable, community-driven and deeply human.”

Other creatives are taking to the stage to connect with audiences over eco-anxiety. Esteban Gast is a Colombian American comedian who jokes about climate change.

“I was watching this movie with my fiancée and [the movie] said: ‘It’s 100 years from now. Half the humans are dead.’ And I genuinely looked at her and I said, ‘That’s pretty good. Half of us made it?’” Gast joked during a set.

He is also the comedian-in-residence at a clean energy advocacy group, Generation180. Gast hopes that by sharing his own eco-anxiety and fears, people in the audience can feel a bit less alone, adding that it’s a tactic that has worked before.

”Comedy has been used [through] all of history to tackle the most serious things,” he said.

Gast said that his sets do well with students and at climate events, but he has also received positive feedback from general audiences who may be less climate-conscious, on the whole.

”People were like, ‘That was funny, that was interesting. Hey, you made me think,’” he said. “I wish it were like a movie and someone said, ‘Wow, you really changed my heart and mind.’ But I think that I talked about things that they perhaps normally aren’t talking about.”

Researchers have also developed tools to explore eco-anxiety in a more structured way.

At the University of Helsinki in Finland, Panu Pihkala helped create the “Climate Emotions Wheel” in collaboration with Climate Mental Health Network, a US-based organization.

“The four words in the middle are broad titles,” Pihkala said.

The words are anger, positivity, fear and sadness. Each one of those then splits into more nuanced feelings. For example, “fear” can manifest as panic, anxiety or powerlessness.

“It’s been translated into more than 30 languages now, and there’s even an emoji version,” he added.

The Climate Emotions Wheel is mostly used by educators and therapists as a visual tool to guide conversations. “Emotion wheels” have a long history in psychology. They were originally created by US psychologist Robert Plutchik in 1980.

“It’s very helpful for people to see names of emotions, perhaps some colors also — some visualizations,” Pihkala said.

While acknowledging and tackling eco-anxiety looks different for each person, the theme of community and conversations ties many of the options together. People who are struggling with eco-anxiety can use the crisis text line for support.