Understanding and Addressing Eco-Anxiety

Originally published April 2025

Universities around the world are considering how to prepare students for a climate-impacted future. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in addressing the psychological distress arising from eco-anxiety.

In several recent studies, between 50-75% of young Canadians reported experiencing feelings of fear, sadness, anxiousness and powerlessness, stating that their mental health is being impacted by climate change, leading to negative feelings about the future (Galway & Field, 2023; Mowreader, 2024). Experiences of Laurier students align with these results. According to the 2024 Laurier Climate Knowledge and Action Survey, 77% of student respondents were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ worried about climate impacts on people, while 83% were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ worried about climate impacts on the environment. Further, a significant number of students reported ‘a little’ or ‘moderate’ impact in terms of concentrating, socializing, studying, sleeping, and eating. This sense of dread is widespread across disciplines, not just in fields related to environmental science or engineering.

In this context, “every course is a climate course,” as Karen Costa states in her Climate Action Pedagogy podcast. Integrating climate pedagogy into your teaching provides students with opportunities to effectively engage with climate change and their anxieties in a variety of ways. Through recognition and validation of students’ climate emotions and creating a teaching environment that promotes education, engagement and action, educators can transform mindsets and turn eco-anxiety into positive action.

Teaching Approaches that Calm, Care & Inform

Implementing teaching and learning activities and strategies that can validate students’ climate emotions (as in the graphic below) and help them understand how these emotions are linked to knowledge, action and empowerment is a critical first task.

Create Safe Spaces for Expression and Reflection

Encourage students to express their anxieties, fears, and frustrations about environmental issues through class discussions, journaling, or peer-to-peer interactions. Providing a supportive, non-judgmental environment helps reduce isolation and fosters emotional processing.

Facilitate a Climate Cafe to help students learn in groups while promoting a sense of belonging, alleviating feelings of embarrassment or being overwhelmed, afraid or uncertain on what and how to contribute.
Include guided “Eco-Anxiety Reflection Circles" during class where students share their feelings about environmental concerns.
In writing or in small group discussions, leverage the use of digital platforms like Padlet, where students post their reflections and engage in anonymous comments.

Help Students Develop Coping Strategies

Offer practical tools for self-care to empower students to take care of their mental health while engaging with environmental issues:

Introduce mindfulness practices, breathing exercises, or relaxation techniques to help students manage stress related to environmental concerns.
Start each lecture with a short, guided mindfulness meditation, allowing students to center themselves before engaging in complex discussions.
Provide internal resources and an external list of online mental health apps, such as Calm, or Rose Buddha Meditation.

Deepen Students’ Understanding of Environmental Issues

Arm students with the tools to transform eco-anxiety into constructive environmental action, changing perceptions towards the development of eco-empathy, eco-compassion, eco-caring and eco-agency (Hickman, 2020).

Ensure students have access to knowledge from both Western and Indigenous science, by engaging them in environmental observation and climate research.
Introduce frameworks like Two-Eyed Seeing, which blends Indigenous and Western knowledges, to enrich students' understanding.
Weave outdoor and nature-focused activities – land-based pedagogies – into your course by including class or individual nature walks, fieldwork, group work or individual or group ‘Sit Spot’ activities.

Clarify how these activities are connected to Course Learning Outcomes

Design your course with effective learning outcomes that address both the Cognitive Domain (Critical Thinking, Problem Solving) and Affective Domain (Attitudes, Values, Beliefs) with a focus on unearthing the range of emotions identified on the Climate Emotions Wheel (see above). Consider incorporating or building on the following learning outcomes in your disciplinary context to guide your activity selection and your students’ success:

Define and describe the concept of eco-anxiety and recognize its prevalence, psychological and physiological impacts on varied populations and diverse communities.
Identify and analyze the emotional spectrum associated with eco-anxiety and eco-grief, including fear and hopelessness, and the associated extent of climate emotions.
Develop “meaning-focused coping skills” (Ojala et al., 2019) allowing for negative and positive climate emotions to coexist, strengthening pro-environmental behaviours.
Apply resilience-building strategies to manage eco-anxiety, including mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral techniques, and spending time in nature (Bratman et al., 2019; Richardson & Butler, 2022).

From Eco-Anxiety to Eco-Empowerment: Assessments and Experiential Learning

Moving from anxiety into action provides a golden opportunity to address eco-anxiety in students through fostering agency, empowerment, resilience, and hope. Help students understand how they can make a difference by highlighting student-led initiatives, volunteer opportunities, and pathways for contributing to positive change. In particular, collective resilience is built when students collaborate on projects for community-based initiatives or engage in peer learning opportunities that can build “constructive hope” (Marlon et al. 2019).

Provide connections to experts and mentors offering real world applications for tackling eco-anxiety by involving them in experiential learning opportunities. For example, Collaborate with Co-operative Education or Community Service-Learning at Laurier, where rich partnerships can be formed by integrating group projects into a culminating Capstone course such as creating a Community Action Plan for employers, NGOs or other organizations.
Incorporate case study analysis where students analyze a situation of environmental concern, discuss its psychological and societal impacts, and include a proposed action plan for those most impacted by the climate crisis.
Build reflective writing skills with journaling as an activity and as a formative or summative assessment. Invite students to keep a reflective journal throughout the course, documenting their thoughts on eco-anxiety, their experiences with the coping mechanisms, and their evolving perspectives on climate change and mental health.
Organize a “student sustainability fair” in partnership with the Sustainability Office to promote student-led initiatives, where students share their actions, inspire others and build community. Sign up for the Laurier Sustainability Office newsletter to learn ways to get involved in sustainability initiatives on Laurier campuses.

By intentionally centering climate pedagogy in ways that recognize the emotional aspects of climate change, educators can help students develop personal confidence, skills and knowledge that can transform eco-anxiety into a catalyst for meaningful action.