Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has spoken about how at age 11, she was so depressed about climate change she stopped talking and eating and lost 10 kilograms in two months.
Here in Canada, a mother of two children in Salmon Arm, B.C., says her anxiety about the climate her kids will experience “becomes so heavy it’s suffocating.” A Calgary student says she started obsessing about food to cope with her anxiety about the state of our planet, and sometimes was “so overwhelmed with what food choices were best for the planet, I hardly ate at all.”
But how common is this kind of anxiety in Canada? A new study estimates climate anxiety is so severe that it disrupts sleep and everyday functioning for nearly a million Canadians.
The study, published Tuesday in Nature Mental Health, randomly surveyed more than 2,400 Canadians aged 13 or older and categorized them using a climate change anxiety scale developed in the U.S. It asks the extent to which people agree with statements such as “Thinking about climate change makes it difficult for me to sleep” or “I find myself crying because of climate change.”
It found that 90 per cent of respondents were concerned about climate change and 68 per cent felt some level of anxiety — something the researchers thought was a normal, healthy response, given the impacts of climate change such as wildfires and extreme heat.
But 2.35 per cent had “clinically relevant” symptoms.
Clinical significance
Sherilee Harper, the University of Alberta public health professor who led the study, notes that means more than 980,000 people, almost one million people, in Canada, experience climate change anxiety in a way that’s affecting their sleep, ability to concentrate “or their daily life in some sort of negative way that’s reaching clinical significance.”
The rate of “clinically relevant” climate anxiety is slightly below the 2.5 to three per cent of Canadians who have generalized anxiety disorder, although the researchers don’t know how much overlap there is between the two groups.
Britt Wray, who does research on mental health and climate change at Stanford University, says her research shows that young people are among the most affected by climate anxiety. She offers tips on how to deal with climate anxiety.
She and her colleagues found people were experiencing climate anxiety across Canada, even some who didn’t experience impacts such as wildfires or extreme heat themselves.
“What matters… is that there are supports for those people,” she said.
That supports could be individual therapists trained to talk about climate anxiety, or community programs such as climate cafes where people can connect and share their concerns. While there’s evidence that taking action on climate change can help with anxiety, Harper says people also need spaces where they can talk about it without expectations that they’re going to take drastic action.
The study found the rate of climate anxiety decreased with age — it was highest among Generation Y and Z, and lowest among Baby Boomers and older generations.
It was highest among Indigenous people, but other groups also had high rates: women, those with household incomes below $60,000, and those living in Northern Canada.
That’s no surprise to Merril Dean, a school psychologist who works in communities across the Northwest Territories.
She says it makes sense that northerners are more anxious about climate change “because we’re seeing it more up here.”
The North has warmed four times faster than other parts of the world. Dean said when she first moved there 40 years ago, lightning storms were rare and trees were smaller. Warming has since led to bigger trees and more lightning, setting off wildfires.
Existential dread
Dean has written about the impact of the wildfires that forced 70 per cent of the population of the territory to evacuate in 2023.
Upon their return, Dean says their anxiety was set off by the huge changes in their environment, from burnt houses to massive areas of charred trees — and even the massive firebreaks meant to reduce the risks of future wildfires.
There are changes outside wildfire season too, Dean says. Bays remain unfrozen deep into the winter now, leaving many Indigenous communities unable to pursue traditional activities such as seal hunting.
Dean says among kids she works with, “I’m finding a lot of students carry this existential dread that I’ve never seen before. It’s almost, ‘What is the point?'”
Catherine Malboeuf, a psychology professor at Bishop’s University has seen that even in southern Quebec, where she lives.
“What the study seems to show is regardless of your age, we are reacting more to climate change, and there are more and more psychological side effects.”
Malboeuf was not involved in the new study, but has studied climate anxiety in children and is looking into whether there’s a link between it in parents and their kids.
She says there is a shift among clinical psychologists in developing ways to manage climate anxiety.
“The first step would to be to remove the taboo around it, to be able to discuss it openly,” she said.
Both she and Dean say the new study raises a needed awareness.
