Abstract
The climate crisis is an unprecedented existential threat that causes disturbing emotions, such as anxiety. Recently, Clayton and Karazsia measured climate anxiety as “a more clinically significant ‘anxious’ response to climate change” (2020, p. 9). To gain a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon from an empirical psychological perspective, we translated the core of the Climate Anxiety Scale into German and assessed potential correlates in a large German-speaking quota sample (N = 1011, stratified by age and gender). Overall, people reported low levels of climate anxiety. Climate anxiety correlated positively with general anxiety and depressiveness, avoidance of climate change in everyday life, frustration of basic psychological needs, pro-environmental behavioral intentions, and policy support. It correlated negatively with different forms of climate denial and was unrelated to ideological beliefs. We were not able to replicate the two dimensions found in the original scale. Moreover, we argue that items appear to measure a general climate-related emotional impairment, rather than distinctly and comprehensively capturing climate anxiety. Thus, we encourage researchers to rework the scale and include an emotional factor in future research efforts.
Highlights
The climate crisis represents an existential threat to human well-being and survival (Masson-Delmotte et al 2018; Steffen et al 2015)
Building on empirical psychological research by Clayton and Karazsia (2020; see Pikhala (2020) for a review of research on climate anxiety in other disciplines), our research has three goals: First, we validate a German translation of the two core dimensions of the Climate Anxiety Scale (CAS) by Clayton and Karazsia (2020)
We first ran a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to investigate whether a 2-factorial structure of the CAS inspired by Clayton and Karazsia’s work, with the subscales cognitiveemotional impairment and functional impairment, could be confirmed in our sample, using
Summary
The climate crisis represents an existential threat to human well-being and survival (Masson-Delmotte et al 2018; Steffen et al 2015). It is not surprising that people experience disturbing emotions in relation to the climate crisis (Albrecht 2012; Böhm 2003; Norgaard 2006a). Extended author information available on the last page of the article. 1 3 Vol.:(0123456789) 20 Page 2 of 23. With an expected increase in people reporting climate anxiety, “an urgent response is needed from clinicians, public health practitioners, families, researchers, educators, and policy makers” Going beyond previous research, we investigate relations of climate anxiety with climate denial, political ideologies, basic psychological needs, and aspirations. We test whether climate anxiety relates to pro-environmental behavioral intentions and policy support
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