Several projects deal specifically with the range of emotions that climate futures elicit in young people – what is generally called eco-anxiety, but in reality, covers a wide, nuanced range of emotions. Some projects focus on measuring these emotions and understanding their causes and effects. Others try to find ways to help young people deal with these emotions. Others still are addressed to activists, and interested in the links between emotions and action.
A significant (20) number of projects address “eco-anxiety” or “eco-emotions”. Some make emotions their central focus (TEAP, Éco-Motion, Feeling Futures); others consider addressing them as a step in a process, a necessary condition in order to move ahead.
→ In the WOW! section, we expand on what research tells us about eco-emotions, as well as on how to deal with these emotions and how they connect to climate action (Emotions reclaimed).
A massive phenomenon
“Eco-emotions” refer to a wide range of strong emotions elicited by the perspective and/or the experience of climate change, as well as of the lack of support and action to fight it and prepare for its effects: typically, anger, grief, anxiety, guilt, sadness, powerlessness, and on the other side, hope.
These feelings among young people are recorded by projects and surveys all over the globe. As an example, The Eco-anxiety Africa Project (TEAP) found that 66% of young Nigerians were experiencing eco-anxiety, and over 40 % thought they didn’t have the resources or support to overcome it. Other local and global surveys confirm that eco-anxiety is widely shared among young people worldwide.
Eco-emotions have a strong impact on how young people see the future, and their place on it. But they can also have crippling effects on their everyday life.
“Knowing how much unnecessary harm is being caused, we can find it difficult to engage with basic tasks such as relaxing, sleeping, studying or working. Some of us also struggle with exorbitant feelings of guilt about our carbon footprints, despite our understanding that the structures and systems we live in make ethical choices extremely difficult. […] We also debate with ourselves and our partners whether or not to have children, both because of the stress humanity is already putting upon the planet and because we are concerned about the quality of life our children may have.”
Not About Us Without Us
Accepting, naming, coping with eco‑emotions
Young people are often at a difficulty in qualifying the emotions they feel, says Aniela Fidler Wieruszewska (Feeling Futures): “they lack language and tools to connect with their 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 words on their emotions by just pointing at them.
Several projects have tried to find ways to help young participants name their emotions, share them with others, and accept them, which are the preconditions to learning to live with them. Methods range from mindfulness to “acceptance therapy” (Éco-Motion), to personal and collective storytelling, to using arts (music, dance, singing, etc.). Creativity is, in Svetlana Chigozie Onye’s words, “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.” TEAP and other projects also organized intergenerational interactions with elders and/or linked with indigenous (Centre for Reworlding) or religious (TEAP) practices, in both cases to legitimize emotions and provide “models” that can help young people cope with their emotions.
In one case, Puerto Rico 2054, the project emerged almost organically from a major climate-related crisis, Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“The students were designing while living in a disaster. Some didn’t even have roofs over their heads. Despite that, they showed concern, creativity, and resilience. They gradually shifted from being overwhelmed to being more focused and hopeful. Their visions of the future were not dystopian, they were practical and optimistic. […]
The process gave students emotional grounding. By the end of the semester, they felt more in control. The class became a form of therapy, a way to stop focusing solely on the disaster and instead imagine the future. They worked with cardboard mock-ups because computers weren’t an option. They embraced the power of imagination. This project was blessed by the sense of community it created.”
Maria de Mater O’Neill, Puerto Rico 2054
Safe spaces
It is not easy to get young people to acknowledge feelings of anxiety. Young people, particularly teenagers, also don’t like to stand out in their group. “They don’t want to show that they are scared”, (Aniela Fidler Wieruszewska), “they don’t want to say anything if their friend hasn’t said something” (Svetlana Chigozie Onye).
Whatever the methods used, getting young people to open up about these complex emotions generally requires the existence of some sort of permanent or ephemeral “safe space” where participants accept and support each other. TEAP has created a formula called ZenCafes: “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.” ZenCafes are multiplying in various parts of Africa via a training and grants program called Zen Guardians.
Activist emotions
Several projects specifically focus on studying (JustFutures) and supporting (Éco-Motion, Youth Climate Lab, Campus de l’Engagement) climate activists, who can themselves be overwhelmed by the perspective of climate change, as well as by the difficulty of getting things done on this front.
These projects do not limit themselves to helping young activists process their emotions: they also recognize that activism, in its collective form, is in itself a way to “move from fear to love” (A Fearless Mural for the COP27), even a form of “group therapy”, in the words of one of JustFuture’s young participants. Activism provides an outlet to emotions; peer-to-peer and other types of support; and mechanisms to “politicize” our emotions, i.e., to connect them to broader issues than ourselves. We will dive deeper into the importance of activism in the WOW! section.