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For many people, climate change provokes strong and at times overwhelming feelings: fear, anxiety, and despair are commonly reported emotions. And when younger people speak to older generations about climate change, the strongest emotions felt are betrayal, uncertainty and worry. These are powerful and challenging responses that are valid and legitimate in the context of the scale and pace of climate change.
Emotions like these matter because of their ability to shape people’s experiences, thoughts and actions. Both positive and negative emotions underpin a wide range of responses to climate change – from policy support to building community resilience. Anger (in its different forms) has been found to predict activism and support for climate policy. And while not as commonly reported as other emotions, a sense of optimism can be found in taking meaningful personal steps, or being inspired by the stories and actions of others.
Yet emotions also have the power to disconnect people from thinking or caring about climate change. For those who are disillusioned with or disengaged from the climate conversation, their strongest emotions may be reserved for their rejection of climate policies or environmentalism in general (sometimes called ‘contrarian’ anger). For some people, climate change doesn’t provoke many emotions at all.
This thread brings together research on the emotional spectrum that people experience – and campaigners appeal to – around climate change.
This open access research paper explains how emotions are key influences on the ways people think about climate change, and the actions they might take to address the climate crisis. It outlines how both positive and negative emotional communications can promote sustainable behaviours.
Emotions trigger ‘motivational tendencies’ that influence people’s ability to cope with different types of situations. For instance, fear can lead to defensive responses (such as fight, flight, or freeze), while sadness can result in seeking to change one’s personal circumstances.
Emotions also influence how we think about issues and evaluate responses – for instance, emotions like hope, fear or anger may influence our sense of risk from climate change, or how much control we feel in pursuing different types of actions.
In a survey of 10,000 children and young people (aged 16–25 years) across ten countries around the world (including the UK) found that:
Taking action may be crucial in shaping how we think and feel about climate change, according to this open access research paper. By carrying out climate actions people may ‘self-persuade’ – building up a sense of confidence, or ‘agency’, to carry out further climate actions. As Kris De Meyer and colleagues write:
“our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowing how to act.
Due to this persuasion-through-action effect, storytelling can play a key role, as we can pick up this confidence to act from other people too:
“One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing a wide variety of stories of people taking positive action on climate change.”