Report from WTFutures’ second Agora on “Eco-emotions” (April 17, 2025)

The topic of WTFutures’ second online conversation was eco-emotions, a topic we hadn’t seen coming at the beginning of the project. However, eco-anxiety, and the range of emotions experienced by youth in the face of climate futures, came out so strongly through many projects and interviews that we needed to address it head on. To discuss it, we gathered Svetlana Chigozie Onye, who leads the Eco-Anxiety Africa Project (TEAP), Aniela Fidler Wieruszewska, designer and PhD student on “how young people feel and deal with the climate emergency”; and Arnaud Sapin, PhD student in social and environmental psychology.

What are eco-emotions?

The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht defines eco-anxiety as “the sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in a process of collapse[1]”. It is, according to Arnaud Sapin, both an existential emotion – an expression of how we perceive our possibility to exist in the world –, and a political one, because it has a collective aspect, down to how we judge institutions, corporations and other organizations.

Although eco-anxiety is the expression most commonly heard, there is a whole range of eco-emotions: typically, anger, guilt, sadness, powerlessness, and on the other side, hope.

How big is the issue?

Whatever its precise form, eco-anxiety in youth is a massive phenomenon. In 2021, a survey of 10,000 children and young people (aged 16–25 years) in ten countries reported that 84% of respondents were “worried”, and 59% very or extremely worried about climate change. More than 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning. Svetlana Chigozie Onye concurs: TEAP’s survey in Nigeria found that 66% of young people were experiencing eco-anxiety, and over 40 % thought they didn't have the resources or support to overcome it.

According to Svetlana, “eco-anxiety manifests itself across Africa because climate events are happening quickly, and young people are also facing different issues like political instability and poverty, and they have neither the social capital nor the support they would need. All of this plays a role in their ability to recover from, and thrive in the context of climate change and it does have mental health impacts”, sometimes reaching pathological levels: depression, PTSD…

In his own surveys, Arnaud Sapin notes that eco-emotions have a strong impact on how young people see their place in the future. Most of them feel that they will not have access to the same opportunities as their parents. Their vision of climate change impacts their professional choices, their choices in studies, and even their vision of possible parenthood.

Eco-emotions are therefore a massive phenomenon and issue, with huge consequences on how young people (and others) see themselves, how they perceive the future, and also how they relate to climate action. Yet they are seldom discussed, or too easily dismissed, in many discussions of climate action. Says Aniela Fidler Wieruszewska: “Often, climate conversations focus on facts and behaviors and solutions, concluding with “this is what we need to do”. We skip over how people feel about this, even about the very solutions. To me, emotions are integral to the possibility of behavioral or other change.”

Accepting, naming, discussing eco-emotions

Young people are often at a difficulty in qualifying the emotions they feel, says Aniela: “they lack language and tools to connect with those emotions. There is no emotional literacy, so they have neither the vocabulary nor the confidence to describe what's actually going on inside them.” This led her to using tools such as the Feelings Wheel to help people put word on their emotions by just pointing at them.

It is also not easy for young people to open up about their feelings. “We have to consider the stigma that exists on mental health in many African communities, where you’re expected to just survive and you go through life”, says Svetlana. “As we started to do youth-led gatherings, we had to help the participants identify themselves within the definitions we gave them. When we provide that educational element, they are often able to say ‘this is exactly what I'm feeling’.” Young people, particularly teenagers, also don’t like to stand out in their group. “They don't want to show that they are scared”, shares Aniela. “They don't want to say anything if their friend hasn't said something”, concurs Svetlana. “So we play a video of someone else speaking about how they're feeling anxiety, grief and pain, because then they can realize that it’s okay to feel that too.”

One of the ways of helping young people express and discuss their emotions is therefore to offer “safe spaces” where to do it. Provided, according to Aniela, you call them anything but that: “In my experience once you say this is a safe space, they shut down. It's very easy, in this kind of positive psychology environment, to make things weird even though you don't intend to. You want to create a neutral space that is welcoming to emotions, that normalizes them without needing to be named.”

However you name them, these spaces allow young people to connect words and emotions, and to understand that these emotions are a normal reaction. “It is perfectly rational to be afraid, to be angry”, says Arnaud. “It’s actually a good start to acknowledge this emotion. To me, saying ‘Yes, that is what I feel, and it’s OK’ is the first step before going to action and building resilience.”

TEAP’s safe places are called ZenCafes, a program that started in Lagos, Nigeria, and is now expanding all over Africa through the Zen Guardians training program. “Young people would come to Lagos, or meet virtually, and we use guided questions to let them vent about their experiences of climate change, talk about eco-anxiety and then find hope”, explains Svetlana. “We build resilience through individual practices like mindfulness, but also, in Nigeria where storytelling, music and dance are so important to find joy and reprieve from pain, we also try to bring those practices into our youth gatherings.” Since religion plays such a big part in the everyday life of Nigerians, ZenCafes can also invite those who want it to pray. “We also try to bring elders to talk about how they have been able to build hope despite what has happened. What did they experience of nature in the past that is now changing? Seeing your elders being able to speak about the loss that they're also experiencing because of climate change validates youth's emotions and also gives them the opportunity to verbalize their pain.”

The role of creative practices

Once you’ve acknowledged and accepted emotions, what do you do with them? Both Aniela and Svetlana resorted to creative practices: singing, dancing, and storytelling in Nigeria, while in London, Aliena gave her participants textile scraps on which to apply their imagination: “I work a lot with textiles and making. There's this idea inside positive psychology called state of flow, where you feel relaxed and focus on something deeply, and your brain decompresses. In a state of flow, you can have very intense conversations. Creativity is intrinsically emotional and reflective.” It is also, in Svetlana’s terms, “a way to process emotions. After the participants create that artistic piece, allowing them to speak about why they wrote or drew this, allows them to get to that point themselves.”

Creativity is of course connected to culture and identity, helping participants project themselves again as well as find or reclaim their voice, towards “localized forms of resilience", in Svetlana’s terms.

Emotions and action

Emotions and action are deeply linked. On the one hand, a feeling of powerlessness can breed apathy. Suppressed emotions are, in Svetlana’s eyes, the cause of “a lot of the turmoil we experience today. And youth do have this boiling pot of emotions. But I also think it's because they have the innocence to dream of a better future and believe in it.”

However, according to Arnaud, “emotions are the fuel that can give us the energy that we need to go to action. If we look at the studies, most of the eco-emotions are rather drivers than barriers to action. Highly anxious people and angry people are the ones that are doing the most. Taking action consumes a lot of energy. All emotions, whether negative or positive, are drivers, provide energy that we can use to think, to reflect, to question ourselves and in the end to go, to act and make good futures. The worst is to not feel anything!”

The “action” we are talking about here may not be labeled climate action. The first order of action is to go about one’s life, to live according to one’s values and to be able to project oneself into some future. More can accrue from there, but rarely the opposite.

“Feelings and values are quite nicely connected, and they connect to choices”, argues Aniela. “Once we get to choices, then we're talking about the future. Creativity, making things and all other artistic expressions, are an entry way into getting young people to feel safe whilst experiencing strong emotions. That's like a bridge that you build between caring and doing. So your first step is knowledge that you care, which you can express through art. Then those emotions inform the doing. We’ve known for a long time that emotions are a more powerful driver of action than reasonable thinking.” 

[1] Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Cornell University Press, 2019.