‘What Happens Next?’: Why Are We So Anxious About Earth?

Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, “What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?”

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Amanda McKenzie: Climate anxiety is really about feeling powerless and feeling overwhelmed by the size of the problem.

Rhonda Garad: We're really entering a kind of anxiety that our younger generation have that we really haven't seen before.

Alan Reid: Anxiety particularly is focused on an unknown future and what might happen. And if you feel like you're going to lose your future, then anxiety will happen. That's very different from fear, and it's very different from grief.

[Music: There was a turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him… ]

Susan Carland: At the height of the Cold War, American children were introduced to Bert, a cartoon turtle from a US government-funded training film who knew just what to do in a nuclear attack – duck and cover.

[Music: He did what we all must learn to do, you, and you, and you, and you: Duck and cover.]

Film narrator: Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends, because every one of us must remember to do the same thing.

Susan Carland: These days, Bert's strategy seems laughable. Ducking beneath your school desk won't be much help at ground zero in an atomic explosion after all. But at least Bert had a plan. And in a time where everyone was feeling helpless in the face of planetary catastrophe, that was reassuring in itself.

If the phrase “feeling helpless in the face of planetary catastrophe” sent a little shiver of recognition down your spine, it may be because more than 70 years later, we're in a similar situation. This time, the threat is climate change.

This week we're delving into the phenomenon of climate anxiety, a growing mental health burden that's quickly becoming a full-on crisis. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Amanda McKenzie: Hi, I'm Amanda McKenzie. I'm the CEO of the Climate Council. We work to educate Australians on climate action and advocate to the federal government.

Susan Carland: Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

Amanda McKenzie: Well, thanks for having me.

Susan Carland: How would you define climate anxiety?

Amanda McKenzie: I think climate anxiety is really the reasonable concern that the world is changing rapidly in ways that we can't control, and people are increasingly experiencing it in their own life, bushfires, floods, et cetera, and worrying not only about the impacts on them and their family but also the more macro challenges around food security, refugees, et cetera.

Susan Carland: You make the point that it's the reasonable anxiety, and I wonder about that term climate anxiety because when we say someone's anxious about something, often we peg it to things that people, it's an anxiety that shouldn't really be scared of or worried about. The aeroplanes, spiders, those kind of things. Climate anxiety makes a lot of sense. So how do you deal with an anxiety that actually is entirely reasonable?

Amanda McKenzie: It's important to acknowledge that, first of all, to say that it is reasonable to be scared of something that's very scary. And so I think that validation is the first point in being able to accept, “Actually this is a scary thing and it's brave to look at it in the face.”

Susan Carland: As the United Nations' Focal Point from Monash University, ecologist Susie Ho regularly attends climate change conferences, including the annual Conference of the Parties or COP. It's given her a global perspective on climate anxiety.

Susie Ho: We do know from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so the IPCC, that climate change is affecting the health of people globally, and that includes mental health. So mental health impacts can happen from exposure to a whole range of things like extreme weather events, displacement, famine, malnutrition, degradation of social systems, climate-related economic loss and familial loss, and the distress that comes with worrying about climate change. We have very high confidence in this.

So the IPCC has shown that climate change is a rising threat to mental health and wellbeing, spanning emotional distress to anxiety, depression, and even grief. And that's because environmental and human health are closely intertwined. So healthy humans thrive in a healthy environment, but we're really pushing Earth's life support systems to the limit.

And that has led to the emergence and rapid spread of eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, and that's defined by the American Psychological Association as a chronic fear of environmental doom. So a lot of young people are feeling this: 60 per cent of American teenagers, almost 80 per cent of British teenagers feel anxious or fearful.

And that's something that's likely been exacerbated by COVID because we didn't have the same level of social support or engagement with nature during lockdown. And they're two things that are really important to a positive outlook.

Susan Carland: A few years ago, Dr Rhonda Garad, from Monash University’s Centre for Health Research and Implementation, co-led a study to determine climate change's impact on Australian's mental health. Rhonda, welcome.

Rhonda Garad: Thank you. Great to be here.

Susan Carland: How bad is climate anxiety at the moment?

Rhonda Garad: We did our study in 2020, and so it's going back a couple of years now, but we found that it was very high, particularly concerningly among young people, and not only just concern about post-events.

When we did our study, it was just after the major bushfires that wiped out about six per cent of New South Wales. And so we had a very high number of people that had directly experienced climate events, and they were of course suffering from the post-traumatic impacts of that.

But we now have this phenomenon called free anxiety where young people are worried into the future really about not having a future, not being able to envisage a future or a future that is any way the future that their parents or previous generations had. And so we're really entering a kind of anxiety that our younger generation have that we really haven't seen before.

Some people argue that what we're going through now is something like what people went through during wars or the nuclear threats in the last century, but I would argue strongly that what we're actually experiencing and seeing in the mental health of our young people is something we've actually never seen before because the scale of climate is so great, and we know that there's no real effective solutions on the table right now.

So the scale of anxiety is big. It's particularly pronounced in young people, and it's only escalating.

Alan Reid: Hi, my name is Alan Reid and I work in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, and I research environmental sustainability and climate change education.

Susan Carland: Alan, welcome. Tell me, how does climate anxiety manifest itself, particularly, in school-aged children? What does it look like? Is it different to say the anxiety that maybe children living through World War II might've felt? Or is it the same kind of thing?

Alan Reid: That's a good point. One of the main things you find in the studies on this is if you look at the kinds of patterns of response to say the threats of nuclear war in the Cold War period, particularly in the ’80s, there are very similar patterns of anxiety around the future. And anxiety particularly is focused on an unknown future and what might happen.

And if you feel like you're going to lose your future, then anxiety will happen. That's very different from fear and it's very different from grief.

And often these things get bundled together in the schools-related literature on what's happening with young people, what's happening with youth. And the climate strikes are often focused around, “Well, what kind of future am I going to inherit from the current generation?”

So when we start seeing that and we see that there is a similar level of response, so that's very different from say the post-war period and even the ’60s and ’70s because the scale and the complexity of what's going on. It's not like it's an isolated part of the world which is being affected. This affects everybody.

Susan Carland: An intergenerational conflict is brewing. Here's Rhonda.

Rhonda Garad: Young people are very clued into climate science. They're very clued into what's happening. We saw in those extraordinary marches pre-COVID, the school climate strikes, that there's a very, very high level of concern and willingness to take action.

And we also found in our study tremendous frustration among young people, but really across the range of the lack of effective action.

So I think it's a double whammy of real fear about what global warming is going to do in terms of our environment, but also tremendous frustration that people are not acting on the science and that we do know that if we act on the science, we have tremendous possibility of at least limiting the real impacts.

But that's not happening. It's not happening in any way close to the science and it's not happening evenly across the world. So I think that they're very aware of that and they're very concerned because they have a greater stake than you and I, right?

They have their whole lives and life expectancy now is in the high 80s. So kids particularly born today are very likely to live to very old age. And so the young people now have their whole lives that they're actually going to experience the impacts of this.

And we know that the impacts are coming earlier than expected. We know we're actually in the throes of the beginning of the impacts of global warming. So they're very much the ones that are going to experience the full impacts.

And what we found is that even though they had high levels of anxiety and mental health impacts, that they weren't seeking traditional medical assistance, and we speculated that that was because perhaps they didn't feel that that was going to be beneficial in that it's not particularly geared towards dealing with issues of this scale and magnitude that are actually real.

Concerningly, a lot of them are also making lifelong decisions quite early. Many of them are saying they're not going to have children or financial decisions they're making now or the decisions around career and study that we really make for the longer term, they can't see the sense of making these decisions. They find it very difficult to take actions for their longer-term good because they could not really perceive of a longer-term that was in any way manageable.

So it's a sense of powerlessness, a sense of a stuckness is how I'd define that. Just, “What do we do?” We are really facing a future that no other generation has faced. And there was real anger that those in power hadn't done what they could have done when they could have done it.

Susan Carland: Do you think that climate anxiety is taken seriously or is it sort of dismissed as a snowflake concern that people just need to get over?

Rhonda Garad: There is a whole industry in dismissing this. One of the things that is really concerning is that we've seen stories come out in the last few days that there's over a billion-dollar fund being funded for climate denialism so that there are active climate denialists on social media that are actually tapping into that.

So they are actually tapping into that anxiety and saying, “No, it's all rubbish. This alarmism is just contrived.” They're making money out of it. They're just benefiting. So they're tapping into that willingness to switch off and it's really working.

And so absolutely it's dismissed and certainly anything that young people experience is often dismissed by older people in that kind of arrogant way that we boomers, and I'm a boomer, that we boomers do.

And also I think there's a tremendous guilt in the boomer generation around the action that we didn't take because it was actually up to us. It was actually up to our generation. We saw a tremendous rise in the level of carbon in the atmosphere. We didn't stop that. We could have stopped that in the ’80s. We certainly had the evidence and we chose not to.

And so we're dealing with guilt on one end by the boomers, and so it's much easier for us to just dismiss the anxiety of young people as “That's what young people do. They're overzealous, they'll settle down.” And we're all very excited once we all marched for their Vietnam moratoriums and so on. And then we settled into adulthood.

So absolutely, it is far easier to dismiss young people or equal the anxiety that we're all suffering, even the pre-anxiety, which is new than it is to actually deal with this issue.

Susan Carland: The UN's COP events represent a golden opportunity for youth to be heard. Unfortunately, Susie says governments have been slow to get on board.

Is, I guess, climate anxiety unique as a fear, particularly, for young people? Or is this the kind of thing that does seem to come up again and again in different generations when they are facing a catastrophic existential threat?

Susie Ho: I think there are some similarities there in the sense that young people feel a little bit powerless in terms of the upper echelons of decision-making. They don't have a voice in those big political decisions.

I know that the engagement of diverse voices and youth is central to pushing governments towards ambitious commitments on climate and action, but we don't yet have a good mechanism for giving youth a seat at that table.

And so youth at the COPs often talk about youth washing, which is youth being brought in a performative way, and what they want is to actually be involved with the negotiations, not just on the sidelines at side events.

Susan Carland: And so what can we do to try to increase that? I imagine government's kind of reluctant unfortunately to take young voices seriously.

Susie Ho: It's an interesting question. I actually think there's a lot of goodwill from governments and the UN to engage with youth, but we don't have yet very sophisticated or mature mechanisms for doing this.

So for example, the Australian government has an advisory group which is newly formed to represent the youth voice in a political arena. And of course, the UN has a whole range of youth organisations and constituencies, but at the moment, those groups are tending to provide advice on the sidelines rather than being actively involved.

So how do we do that? That's something that I'm really passionate about and involved with at the UN.

Susan Carland: Young people aren't the only demographic shouldering this mental health burden. Here's Kelly O'Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Kelly O'Shanassy: So I do see a lot with younger people, probably anyone really under 30, lives will be very different because of climate change.

The other big group that I see a lot as well is people who really understand climate change, that are alarmed about climate change. And there's this research in Australia called the Climate Compass, and it divides Australians up into how concerned they are about climate change.

About 55 per cent of Australians are concerned, but about 26 per cent of them are very concerned. They're alarmed. And that cohort of people seem to be more fearful and more anxious, and a lot of them, of course, have been calling for a couple of decades for action on climate change. And what they said would happen if we didn't act is happening now.

I probably am one of those people in that category of being active on climate change for a lot longer, I am alarmed about it, but there is absolutely no way I'm giving up. And so I find ways to stay very motivated, but for many others, they are seeing what they feared two decades ago, and that means that they're questioning whether they're having an impact or not.

Susan Carland: Susie says we struggle to reckon with the scale of a planet-sized problem.

Susie Ho: I think when we engage with the issue fully, we can sometimes feel really overwhelmed like, “What can I do in that space? How can I help with climate migrations that are going to happen due to famines in Africa?” It's just too big.

Susan Carland: And even when we bring things a bit closer to home, Alan says the Australian government's solutions aren't reassuring many of us.

Alan Reid: One of the things about an analogy with war is that you see governments working on things. They have a strategy, may not always work, but they have planned, they mobilise the population to achieve a particular end.

One of the common refrains in effect with young people is they don't see government action acting on this. And if you consider the last government in Australia in particular, there was a lot of hostility and frustration and anger around this.

So as well as talking about climate anxiety, climate anger, climate frustration, some psychologists talk about feeling like a climate hostage. The government is not doing enough to let us out of this situation and we're not seeing industry, government, NGOs, locally, nationally, internationally working together to look like there's a plan to sort this.

Susan Carland: After years advocating for positive change for the planet in business, government, and the community sector, Kelly's concerned that Australia still isn't facing up to the realities of climate change.

Kelly O'Shanassy: We should take it more seriously, but we don't. And I think it's got to do with the type of transformations we need to make in order to solve climate change are possible but they are big and they just require governments and businesses to think differently to the way they have thought in the past to solve this problem, which is global and is a risk amplifier.

I always think climate change makes every other risk worse, every other disadvantage worse. And so it requires billions and billions invested into renewals. It requires to change the things that we dig up out of the ground and export to the world.

It will mean that the work that some of us do will change, but the work will still be there. The work will still be good and well-paid, and you'll still be able to live in the regions you live in now, but maybe you'll be exporting different types of electrons to the world.

And so it really requires that different mindset, and that's hard for a lot of people. So they'd just rather say, “Eh, we've got time. This is not as big a problem.” And so it's that denial factor, and slowing things down and not acting fast enough is, I think, a form of climate denial.

So if our governments and our business sectors aren't even facing up to the problem of climate change to the extent they should, of course, then they are not facing up to the problem of the health impacts that has.

Susan Carland: And in fact, I imagine it would actually be a very convenient sidetrack for governments or big business to say, “Let's focus on the mental health aspects of climate change and let's focus on the anxiety.”

But climate anxiety is different. It's not like being scared of spiders or small places. Climate anxiety can only be fixed by fixing the climate problem.

Kelly O'Shanassy: Exactly. And as I say, it's a completely rational response to the types of threats that we know are there. And it's possibly even more frustrating because we do know that those solutions are there right in front of us. We're increasingly learning that those solutions like renewable energy are actually much better for us. There's better jobs, cheaper electricity, healthier planet, have less impact on nature. It's even more frustrating there. But there is no pill you can take to relieve climate anxiety. As I mentioned earlier, there is something individually that we can do. In the end, the power of the people is greater than the people in power.

Protest leader: What do we want?

Protesters: We want action.

Protest leader: When do we want it?

Protesters: Now.

Speaker: We need to hold our government to account. Susan Carland: Worse, many of us have internalised a belief that it's on us as individuals to save the Earth. Here's Rhonda again.

Rhonda Garad: There's another concerning trend, which is around where corporations that are actually causing and contributing most to the carbon impacts that we're seeing are now driving people to believe it's an individual fault issue, and if only we all had EVs and if only we all didn't eat meat, that it's actually up to us and we are actually the problem.

So there is a tremendous worry that people are being really pressured to be very, very disciplined and restrained and completely changed their lifestyle because this is such a big issue.

Susan Carland: But we have to do something. As Kelly points out, climate change isn't an impending threat. We're already grappling with its effects.

Kelly O'Shanassy: And people are very worried. They're quite anxious, they're fearful, they're angry about climate change, and it's because they are seeing the damage that climate change causes right now through terrible floods, fires, droughts in Australia and around the world.

So this is happening now, not in the future, but what we know is it will get worse in the future if we don't act. So that fear is something that I see a lot in people. They talk to myself and people at the Australian Conservation a lot about how afraid they are for their future and how they're trying to actively manage that so that they don't let their fear overwhelm their lives.

Susan Carland: Here's Dr Rhonda Garad. If we don't do anything about climate anxiety, let's pretend it just continues unabated, what happens?

Rhonda Garad: We will see a tremendous level of anxiety at a population level that we haven't seen before. And I think this will lead to actions that are very disruptive within our society. I mean, climate impacts are disruptive in and of themselves.

There was just a report released today which shows that the cost of the impacts recently into the economy are in the billions of dollars and going forward in the next five years are in the multi-billion dollars.

So climate is disruptive anyway, but I think what you're going to see is the social contract, the contract that we all sign up to in one way or the other, that is about a collaboration, that is about working together, that is an implicit agreement that we are all in it together, I think you'll start to see that fraying even more.

You will start to see splintering. You will start to see much more protesting, much more angry... You'll see groups like the Extinction Rebellion become more prominent and their numbers swell. Their numbers are swelling anyway. You'll see them taking disruptive action.

You'll see much more conflict because we're going to see conflict anyway. So when you combine our El Niño and boiling oceans, you are likely to see an El Niño effect on steroids starting this summer. That has enormous impact on water security. So we will see conflict over water security. We will see climate refugees. These will all start to happen.

So we will have this escalating environment of climate, and you will start to see within our society that that anxiety will start to manifest as disruption, and we'll have direct and real impacts on the cohesion within our society that will start to splinter more and more because we are not acknowledging and we are not acting on the anxiety of young people now, even though they're big.

Susan Carland: The challenges of climate change transcend borders, and the scale means it's nearly impossible to fully grasp the extent of the potential harm. With our entire world's future in doubt, it's little wonder climate anxiety is prevalent and growing.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode. Amanda McKenzie, Kelly O'Shanassy, Dr Rhonda Garad, Associate Professor Susie Ho and Professor Alan Reid. You can learn more about their work by visiting our show notes.

Next week on What Happens Next? our experts share valuable strategies for coping with climate anxiety and for inspiring collective action to secure a future worth inheriting.

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