“It should not only be technical education.” Students’ climate anxiety experiences and expectations toward university education in three European universities

Abstract

Climate anxiety is increasing among students in higher education. In this mixed-method study, we map attitudes toward climate anxiety of students from sustainability related study fields. We analyze case study results from three universities in Europe (Helsinki, Warsaw, and Uppsala), querying: students’ needs in coping with climate anxiety in academia and ways university operations can be improved to meet those needs. Results from a cross sectional survey (N = 157) place climate anxiety within a range of emotions, from sadness to hope. The majority of respondents reported a mixture of empowering and paralyzing emotional states. Respondents to semi-structured interviews advise academia to rethink its time economies, prioritize transformative climate action, acknowledge students’ emotion work around sustainability issues, make climate education more humanistic, and include more-than-human-nature in educational spaces. Educators could employ transformative learning approaches to redefine climate anxiety from paralyzing emotion into constructive learning experience.

Keywords:

• climate anxiety
• sustainability
• climate education
• higher education
• emotions

Introduction

Climate anxiety is a gradually increasing problem for young people worldwide (Hickman et al., 2021), yet remains not fully recognized in higher education in terms of diagnosis, research, and action. More students are being exposed to climate anxiety, and universities are not providing enough support for educational actors in managing their own climate related emotions (Ojala, 2016; Pihkala, 2020). Climate anxiety is similar to a related, yet distinct concept of eco-anxiety. Some traditional ecological threats (for example, air pollution) generally operate locally and on shorter timescales, inducing eco-anxiety. In contrast, the climate crisis is characterized by unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, making it both harder to grasp and to cope with, thus inducing a more intense climate anxiety (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022; Zaremba et al., 2022). That is why evidence is emerging that climate anxiety can pose a threat to daily life functioning in diverse populations with a special focus on young people (Heeren et al., 2022; Hickman et al., 2021; Kurth & Pihkala, 2022). Moreover, climate anxiety is seldom experienced as a stand-alone emotion. Rather, it co-occurs with a set of different emotions and feelings, notably but not limited to anger and sadness, and also some positive emotions (Løkken, 2022; Zaremba et al., 2022).

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have explored philosophical understandings of ecological grief (Albrecht, 2019; Budziszewska & Kałwak, 2022; Radomska, 2023), climate worry among high-school youth (Ojala, 2022), as well as psychological functions of climate denial (Wullenkord, 2022). However, less scholarship has focused on climate anxiety mapping within higher education and practices for addressing climate anxiety in university classrooms (Pihkala, 2020).

Global research on attitudes toward climate change (Hickman et al., 2021) shows that young people are “very” or “extremely” worried by their “frightening” future. This supports a classic definition of climate anxiety provided by the American Psychological Association (Clayton et al., 2017, p. 27): “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations.'’ According to Coffey et al. (2021), the majority of operational terms related to ecological and climate anxiety describe it as a “difficult… severe and debilitating… negative emotional response… a distress” (p. 3) meaning it is a stressful and potentially paralyzing emotional state. Nevertheless, alternative visions exist toward climate anxiety that define it as “an adaptive response to the threat of climate change… associated with pro-environmental behavioral engagement” (Comtesse et al., 2021; Ojala et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2020; Verplanken et al., 2020). In this view, ecological or climate anxiety can be regarded as at least a partially empowering state, a sign of emotional engagement, and a call to action.

Qualitative studies show that the landscape of climate emotions is broad, featuring different variations of anxiety, including clinical anxiety symptoms and severe distress, but also depressive experiences, distorted mood, excessive worrying, loss of hope, anger, and more (Budziszewska & Jonsson, 2022; Zaremba et al., 2022). Not surprisingly, given this wide range of emotional responses of young people, climate anxiety is also a gradually increasing challenge in higher education, especially in sustainability related fields that purposefully expose both teachers and students to awareness of environmental threats (Pihkala, 2020). University teachers are not well prepared for tackling climate anxiety either in their students or in themselves during the educational process.

Even though teachers are well versed with the issue of climate change, they can strengthen problematic kinds of climate anxiety as they tend to neglect emotions in their teaching (Ojala, 2022; Zembylas, 2002) and are often unable to respond to their students’ emotions (Rosiek & Beghetto, 2009). Hence, Pihkala (2020) argues that teachers need to examine their own skills and attitudes related to emotions. Moreover, emotions that teachers have regarding climate change influence their teaching; Lombardi and Sinatra (2013) found that many pre- and in-service teachers experience anger about climate change, and Lee et al. (2012) found that pre-service teachers attribute guilt to industrialized nations for causing global warming without acknowledging their belonging to these nations.

While educational institutions should attend to students’ readiness to learn and their academic performance, which are influenced by their well-being (Keeling, 2014), students’ needs related to emotional coping with climate anxiety remain largely unaddressed. For example, Pihkala (2020) suggests universities should offer protocols for sharing information about coping with eco-anxiety and other climate- and sustainability-related emotions, with support structures built for educators and students, including peer support groups. Other scholars have also advocated for similar aims (Wallace et al., 2020).

Despite attempts to explore practices of managing emotions in higher education, empirical data is missing on evaluation of such practices as well as factors influencing climate anxiety over time in higher education. For instance, in Sweden, an ongoing longitudinal study examines high school students’ climate change worries (Ojala, 2022), but there are few studies concerning climate anxiety among students in higher education. The few existing studies did not focus on climate anxiety exclusively, or focused on it in specific contexts, but nevertheless they demonstrated the importance of emotional responses around environmental issues in higher education contexts (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022; Wallace et al., 2020).

Moreover, the situation in Nordic countries such as Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway might be an interesting venue for climate anxiety research. These countries have very high levels of environmental concerns and worries, with 40% of global online searches for climate anxiety coming from Nordic countries; climate worry is also high in Poland (Moench, 2023; Zaremba et al., 2022; Ceglarz et al., 2018).

In this article, we provide an initial mapping of perceptions and attitudes toward climate anxiety of students from sustainability related study fields, focusing on case study results from three universities in Europe (Helsinki, Warsaw, and Uppsala). The research questions are as follows. What perceptions, personal experience, and attitudes toward climate anxiety and other related emotions do students from sustainability related study fields report? How is climate anxiety positioned among other anxiety sources for students? What needs do they express in relation to coping with climate anxiety in university studies and how might university operations be improved to meet the students’ needs?

Materials and methods

Research design overview

We use an exploratory mixed method design corresponding to the emergent character of the field. To perform the initial mapping of students’ experiences, we first conducted a quantitative cross-sectional survey inviting students from three different universities. The survey implementation was followed by a qualitative inquiry involving semi-structured interviews of ten participants from the initial survey sample.

Since the study was exploratory in both qualitative and quantitative components and aimed at initial mapping in specific populations, rather than specific hypothesis testing, we did not engage in power analysis a priori.

Participants and recruitment

The selection of participants for the cross-sectional survey (N = 157) was based on purposive sampling. We explicitly invited students from sustainability related study fields in three universities: Uppsala University (campus on the island Gotland, Sweden), University of Warsaw (Poland), and University of Helsinki (Finland). We defined sustainability related studies in a broad sense, as including any programs or freestanding courses mentioning sustainable development concepts and applications, climate change, as well as local or global environmental problems. We decided to focus on these three universities because sustainability education is strongly presented there, and these are institutions where we work and, thus, understand the cultural context, which is important for qualitative study designs. Recruitment was performed on a voluntary basis through related social media channels, email lists, and the help of teachers sending information about the research to their students.

Semi-structured interviews were performed with students who completed the survey, expressed their interest in interviewing by answering a corresponding question in the survey, and provided their contact data (N = 57). After being contacted, 10 respondents finally agreed to be interviewed.

Data collection

The cross-sectional survey was implemented online from February to November of 2022. The questionnaire included three parts: (1) demographic data and study related information (affiliation, study program, year of study etc.); (2) climate anxiety identification including intensity levels, duration, and other emotion-related sources of climate anxiety; and (3) available coping mechanisms/means of resilience (sources of support and coping, university support, and support satisfaction levels). The survey questionnaire is in Appendix 1. The characteristics of the cross-sectional survey participant group (N = 157) are reflected in Table 1.

Table 1. Characteristics of the cross-sectional survey respondents group (N = 157).

Gender	Females 116 Males 36 Other/prefer not to say 5
Age range (mean)	18–58 (25)
Country of origin	Europe 135 (Austria 1, Belarus 2, Belgium 1, Croatia 1, England 1, Finland 31, France 2, Germany 11, Hungary 1, Iceland 2, Ireland 2, Italy 4, Lithuania 1, Netherlands 5, Poland 29, Portugal 2, Romania 1, Russian Federation 2, Slovakia 1, Spain 3, Sweden 28, Turkey 2, Ukraine 2) Asia & Pacific 11 (China 3, Japan 1, Pakistan 2, Singapore 1, Sri Lanka 1, South Korea 1, Taiwan 1, Thailand 1) North America 7 (Canada 2, USA 5) South/Latin America 3 (Brazil 1, Chile 1, Mexico 1) South Africa 1
University	Uppsala University 88 University of Warsaw 37 University of Helsinki 31
Sustainable development, Climate change, Environmental problems	Main study program 115 Additional free standing course(s) 17 Are only briefly mentioned at some lectures 7 Not sure 18
Climate anxiety duration	0 years: 23 1–5 years: 84 6–10 years: 34 11–20 years: 16

The semi-structured in-depth interviews were performed between January and March of 2023 in a conversational format (Kvale, 1996) with students from Uppsala University (seven respondents), University of Warsaw (two respondents), and University of Helsinki (one respondent).

The interview guide included an introduction (to double check the demographic data and study related information); a follow-up of the survey answers the respondent provided previously with deeper conversation; as well as exploration of experiences, attitudes, and coping techniques related to climate emotions in university studies. The interview guide is in Appendix 2.

Interview participants were given a choice of two interview modes: face-to-face or via Zoom call. Five participants chose face-to-face format and five chose Zoom. The average length of an interview was one hour. The Swedish Ethical Review Authority (diary number 2022-04621-01) granted ethical approval for this study. Each participant was provided with information about the research aims, the nature of participation, and format; all participants signed a consent form.

The characteristics of in-depth interview participants (N = 10) are reflected in Table 2. The names are changed and all personal details that can affect confidentiality have been removed.

Table 2. Characteristics of the interview group (N = 10).

Name	Age, country, gender	University, study program	Climate anxiety duration	Anxiety level over the last year caused by*
				Overall	Univ. studies	Personal life	Socio-political	Climate change
Alma	24 Germany Female	Uppsala University, Master Program Sustainable Destination Development	More than 10 years	3	1	1	3	3
Krystyna	25 Poland Female	Warsaw University Interdisciplinary Program of Sociology and Natural Sciences	It all started about 7-5 years ago, but the state of the ugliest anxiety connected with the increase of awareness has lasted 2 years.	3	2	1	5	5
Lili	22 France Female	Exchange student in Uppsala University, Master Program Tourism and Sustainability	More than 5 years.	4	2	4	4	5
Ewa	25 Poland Female	Warsaw University, PhD Studies in Biology	About a year ago, when I started learning about it.	2	1	1	4	4
Fiona	25 Ireland Female	Uppsala University, Master Program Sustainable Development	1 year	2	3	3	2	3
Daria	28 Russia Female	Uppsala University, Master Program Computer Science	4 years	5	2	5	4	4
Sigrid	24 Finland Female	University of Helsinki, Faculty of Bio- and Environmental Sciences	5 years	3	4	4	5	5
Rohaan	38 Pakistan Male	Uppsala University, Master Program Sustainable Management	Started at the workplace and mainly after starting this Master’s program.	3	5	1	4	5
Maja	43 Sweden Female	Uppsala University, Master Program Cultural Heritage and Sustainability	In primary school (in the 1990s!) I did a presentation about the greenhouse effect, I have tried to do what I can, using the little power I have as an individual to live responsibly and vote responsibly, the anxiety has always been there, the last 10 years the feeling of hopelessness has taken over.	4	3	2	4	5
Lucas	22 Belgium Male	Uppsala University, Master Program Implementation, Transformative Learning and Sustainability	I would say around 2-3 years that I understand that the problem is enormous and it actually affects my mental state.	4	3	4	4	3

Note: The scale represents self-reported anxiety levels from 1 - no anxiety at all to 5 - high level of anxiety.

Data analysis

Quantitative data analysis

Statistical analysis of survey results was performed with SPSS ver. 16.0.2 (IBM). To compare participants’ climate anxiety levels from different sources we conducted a paired-samples t-test. To estimate if there is a difference in anxiety levels with respect to gender, we performed a one-way ANOVA, followed by the post-hoc Tukey HSD test. Similarly, we used one-way ANOVA to check differences in anxiety levels in relation to how respondents define their climate related emotional state.

Data analytic strategy for qualitative data

The qualitative interviews analysis follows the guidelines for reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), including familiarization phase, annotating initial ideas, creating themes in a reflexive way, and revising them. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. The second author read each transcript multiple times and documented emergent motives (similar to single insights or ideas) via inductive, interpretative annotation. Then she developed the initial themes (larger interpretative ideas summarizing a group of insights) from the initial notes via a reflexive process. In the subsequent step, the themes were written up and then reviewed by both authors. Authors discussed them including self-reflexivity, choice of narrative frame, and final naming. Both authors agreed on the final form of the qualitative results.

The authors practiced self-reflexivity, which involved exploring our own experiences within the academic context and our educational experiences and climate anxiety via conversations and discussions. Our position toward the study is engaged and informed by several years of experience in academia including in climate change and sustainability education. We understand this insider position as enhancing and structuring our qualitative data analysis. However, in line with the method, the final presentation of results is to be understood as a systematic and situated attempt of interpretation, and not final understanding of the data. Furthermore, we accept that surveys based on self-reporting have limits in terms of recognizing climate emotions and distinguishing them among others (see more at Paulhus & Vazire, 2007). To address this limitation, an additional quality step - a written and anonymized presentation of the results - was returned to the participants for their feedback. No objections to publish the results were received.

Results

Survey results

To explore the positioning of climate anxiety among other anxiety sources, we analyzed the self-reported anxiety levels by survey participants (percentage out of all responses, N = 157) as presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Survey participants’ self-reported anxiety levels by different sources, % (N = 157) from 1 – no anxiety at all to 5 – high level of anxiety over the previous year.

On average, respondents’ climate anxiety level (M = 3.61, SD = 1.07) was higher than their level of socio-political anxiety (M = 3.43, SD = 1.03, t(156) = 2.29, p < 0.05, 95% CI [0.02, 0.03]), their level of anxiety related to personal life (M = 3.2, SD = 1.19, t(156) = 3.2, p < 0.05, 95% CI [0.16, 0.66]), as well as their level of anxiety caused by university studies (M = 3.31, SD = 0.97, t(156) = 2.88, p = 0.05, 95% CI [0.09, 0.51]). Climate anxiety level was not significantly different from overall anxiety level.

To understand participants’ concerns related to socio-political issues, we asked them to provide examples. A total of 261 different threats were listed and classified into eight themes presented below in declining order. Percentage represents the percentage of mentions of the corresponding threats’ group out of the total 261 identified threats in every group (see Table 3).

Table 3. Socio-political threats (N = 261, grouped in eight thematic sections) self-reported by survey participants as worrying factors.

№	Name of socio-political threats’ group	%
1	War (in Ukraine)	26
2	Political threats (stagnation in global political debates, ill-mannered governance, right-wing populist parties, increase of fascism and neo-Nazis)	18
3	Climate change and other environmental threats (among them lack of climate action, environmental policy issues, biodiversity loss, environment catastrophes)	16
4	Social threats (among them migration crisis, anti-LGBT rhetoric, injustices and inequalities, poor medical care, humanitarian crisis, crime, addiction, racism, populism, conspiracy theories, and discriminating attitudes)	15
5	Economic threats (among them lack of jobs, capitalism, insecurity of future income, global hunger, poverty, inflation, energy crisis)	13
6	COVID-19 and global pandemic	6
7	Personal/family issues (family being unsafe, selfish and shortsighted attitudes of people, uncertainty for one’s own future)	3
8	Education related sources of anxiety (not succeeding in studies, thesis defense, hard exams, and deadlines)	3

We also asked the participants an open-ended question about emotions they experience in relation to climate change. Figure 2 represents the relative frequencies of their answers.

Figure 2. The percentage of respondents referring to each emotion related to climate change (out of N = 257 total mentions).

The most prevalent emotions were sadness and anger, followed by guilt, frustration, hopelessness, and helplessness. Eagerness and hope were also expressed.

In addition, participants were asked to rate whether they experienced their climate emotions as empowering, stressing, or a mixture of both. Only 9% named it as an exclusively stressing state, and 17% identified these emotions with an empowering state. The majority (63%) of respondents regarded their climate related emotional state as a mixture of both an empowering state (a call to action that motivates one toward a positive change) and a stressing state (that paralyzes and drains one’s energy).

Respondents who regarded climate anxiety as a stressing emotion worried more about both university studies (F_{3, 153} = 4.675, p < 0.05) and climate change (F_{3, 153} = 21.728, p < 0.001) compared with those who regarded climate anxiety as a call to action and an empowering emotion. Furthermore, females worried more than males in all anxiety cases except personal life related ones (university related F_{2, 154} = 3.477, p < 0.05; socio-political issues F_{2, 154} = 6.896, p < 0.05; climate related F_{2, 154} = 15.611, p < 0.001).

Semi structured interviews

We grouped the contents of the reflexive thematic analysis into two main themes and nine subthemes (see Table 4). The titles of the subthemes are combinations of quotes and our depictions of themes.

Table 4. Themes and subthemes created in the reflexive thematic analysis.

Themes	Sub themes
Climate anxiety is multi-faceted and has diverse temporal trajectories	“It is not that I am lying awake every night.” Climate anxiety does not have to be acute anxiety. But sometimes it is.
	“This is not something where the weird people go but super normal.” Students normalize climate anxiety.
	“The level of suffering is bothering me the most.” Climate anxiety flows from values of empathy and care.
	“It has transformed into sort of a motivation.” Climate anxiety is intimately connected to motivation for action.
	“I gained a lot of knowledge and it was really disturbing.” Academic learning as a source of climate anxiety.
Experiences and expectations toward the university environment.	“Almost no one takes it seriously.” Climate anxiety is triggered by a lack of adequate climate action, including in academia.
	Community of practice. Peer community, teachers as mentors, and time.
	“It should not only be technical education.” Perceived need for emotion work in academia.
	“Relying on nature when nature needs help seems a little bit hypocritical.” Paradoxes of nature-based coping.

Climate anxiety is multi-faceted and has diverse temporal trajectories

“It is not that i am lying awake every night.” Climate anxiety does not have to be acute anxiety. But sometimes it is.

There was no single definition of climate anxiety among students. The climate anxiety label was used to describe a range of experiences, with various meanings, intensities, and valences. In these compound states, multiple emotions such as sadness, anger, fear, but also hope and motivation coexisted and evolved over time. This is similar to previous research, where climate anxiety coexisted with other related emotions (Løkken, 2022; Zaremba et al., 2022).

One common contrast was between climate anxiety as an actual emotion, embodied and acute, and as a long-term state of worry and concern. The first often comes with acquiring new information and can be accompanied by a preoccupation with knowledge. The second is a long term less intense process similar to an awareness of a serious problem. Temporal trajectories of climate anxiety experiences can be very diverse, from acute anxiety experiences in the beginning (as, for example, when someone first learns about the severity of the climate crisis), followed by a sense of getting better, to recurrent difficult episodes of acute anxiety, and to a trajectory of constant low intensity worry accompanying a person over a long time, sometimes many years, or from childhood.

Lili (22 y.o.) described acute experience the following way: “It can come whenever like some sort of crisis where I will be crying for hours,” and she narrates it as a felt, embodied, “hot” emotional state: “…and I feel like struggling. I feel out of breath.” However, she also stressed the long-term nature of it: “So I would say that eco-anxiety, as it’s called, is basically something that gets into you deeply and that cannot leave you.” Maja (43 y.o.) also stresses the long-term nature of her experience, and the ubiquity of possible triggers for it:

The constant worry in the pit of my stomach every time I'm, yeah, when you read the news, when you watch everything around you, like local development, global development, friends and it’s basically constantly everywhere in every part of my life.

Daria (28 y.o.) stresses explicitly that her experience, even if it involves a form of profound worry, is not a constant anxiety state: “It is not that I'm lying awake every night.”

Students narrate climate anxiety as multifaceted, often profound and burdening, and mixed with other emotions such as anger and helplessness. Interestingly, none of the participants evaluated climate anxiety as a 100% negative phenomenon. Instead, students tended to normalize it and connect it with their values such as empathy and action. This is elaborated in the next themes.

“This is not something where the weird people go but supernormal.” Students normalize climate anxiety.

Participants stressed a distinctiveness of the climate anxiety experience from being a person who is anxious all time, and hence, emotionally dysregulated, or having an anxiety disorder. Daria (28 y.o.) elaborates on this difference: “Yeah my worry is high all the time but yeah I don’t feel worried all the time.” She continues explaining, “…I always am anxious somewhere but it’s not that I'm going through the day anxious or scared or like it’s two different things.”

This non-medicalized and normalized attitude relates to so-called feeling norms (Howard, 2022; Wardell, 2020)—unspoken rules about what kind of feelings or worries are accepted as legitimate. One of the feeling norms among our interviewees would be, for example, that staying detached and emotionless in the face of climate loss is not desirable, and thus even very difficult emotions are legitimate. Alma (24 y.o.) commented on this:

I think yeah emotion should not be something that is so out of the academic context I think it should be so much more being part of the academic context, maybe (…) students (…) sharing emotions and that this is not something where it’s considered the weird people go or but what is just super normal.

While societal views regarding what kinds of emotions are acceptable can be diverse (Wardell, 2020), institutions and groups often create their own emotions norms, drawing from the cultural repertoire. Dispassionate states of scientific objectivity are often endorsed as the norm in academic institutions (Hamilton, 2020), making expression of genuine climate feelings difficult for students and staff.

“The level of suffering is bothering me the most.” Climate anxiety flows from values of empathy and care.

All participants in this study narrated climate anxiety as a dynamic experience, evolving over time. Some told very long personal histories of early sensibility to the suffering of others, social injustice, and environmental damage. For example, Alma (24 y.o.) remembers: “I was 10 or 11, so I was realizing that things are going wrong (…) realizing about inequalities in the world and global warming.” Krystyna (25 y.o.) explains: “I am quite a sensitive person and I have always had some anxiety, some difficult feelings when I saw some rubbish in the woods or something like that.” She then continues to explain her anxiety as a form of empathic concern, transcending also to the nonhuman world:

In general, life on planet Earth will survive, will kind of make it, but people won’t and a lot of species won’t. So this level of suffering is bothering me the most, you know, the migration crisis, wars (…) So, I don’t have this kind of visions that the Earth is going to collapse or something like that. No, I have rather this anxiety about the suffering of animals. I'm very sad to hear that lots of species, animals, and plants are dying now.

Rohaan (38 y.o.) uses the word empathy while defining the core of climate anxiety: “It is your subconscious; it is your empathy toward the place where not just you, but the generation coming next is going to live.”

Moreover, all participants reported feeling responsible and trying to do as much as they can, in private life, or by joining climate action. Thus in participants’ narratives climate anxiety was connected to ethics of care and responsibility. Many participants agreed, as living in privileged places in Europe, the anxiety was not primarily about them. Alma (24 y.o.) mentions even gratitude in this context:

I also thought I would maybe also say a feeling of gratitude that I'm privileged to deal with these things even though it’s maybe not the most positive feelings that I have with it and that it can be overwhelming as well but still I am so much privileged that I have the chance to deal with this or even have this on my mind because I don’t have to care that much about more pressing issues like my normal demands for living.

This connection to values explains why, while burdening and difficult, climate anxiety is not primarily seen as a negative or clinical phenomenon. Earlier studies have also pointed to empathy at the core of climate anxiety, and that this type of ethical reevaluation supports wellbeing and can change affective aura around climate anxiety (Hickman, 2020). It also links to the next theme, about the connection between anxiety and action.

“It has transformed into sort of a motivation.” Climate anxiety is intimately connected to motivation for action.

The link between climate anxiety and climate action was recurrent in many stories. For example, Lili (22 y.o.), who earlier described costly emotional crises, at the same time, evaluated her anxiety as constructive: “So it’s a rather constructive feeling when you are trying to, through your anxiety, to change things.” Rohaan (38 y.o.) tells the following story, about connecting knowledge, emotion, and action in a group of sustainability students:

In the beginning of the program, it was extreme. No joke but I actually cried a lot for this, about this. I cried like what is happening around us and then later on our classmates, we got together and we started counselling and helping each other and then it came to a point where we realized that it exists and we need to make changes or we need to bring about some changes in this world and let’s say it has transformed into sort of a motivation now but whenever we think about this motivation even, the anxiety always is there at the bottom.

Starting sustainability studies can also be seen as a form of action, as knowledge can be a tool in making change. Sigrid (25 y.o.) explains: “My anxiety actually like prompted me to start studying in environmental.” However, her experiences with action are also difficult:

Another thing is that I volunteer for an NGO where we fight food waste and just exceed food we waste on a daily basis. (…) And it’s also very frustrating to see how much fightback we get when we try to suggest changes. (…) being involved in this NGO, for example, just shows me that my impact is very, very small.

Krystyna (25 y.o.) described a personal trajectory of her attitudes toward action and agency:

I was very stressed about that because I felt very responsible. (A few years ago) I felt that we as individuals, we can change everything. And now, (…) I see that we can’t change almost anything. So now I do what I do on a daily basic because (it is) the only ethical behavior (…) And I feel good with that because I do what I can. But I don’t think that I have a real impact.

To sum up, participants often linked climate anxiety with taking action, and reported positive sides of active coping with anxiety. Action was viewed as contributing to solutions, as a source of positive emotions, and as a form of ethical integrity. This was often evidenced in previous research (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022; Ray, 2018) and fits into the theoretical divide between climate anxiety as “practical anxiety” (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022) versus paralyzing anxiety (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020). However, in our study, taking action was also often double-edged, as it confronted students with the scale of the problem and limits of agency.

“I gained a lot of knowledge and it was really disturbing.” Academic learning as a source of climate anxiety.

Another common facet of many stories was about the complex relationship between learning and anxiety. Krystyna (25 y.o.) defines climate anxiety as related to climate information:

For me, it’s the fact that when you are overloaded with information about climate change, it’s always negative (…). Media are often mentioned in this context, but for several participants, the source of distressing information was their studies (…). With all these studies that I was involved in, I gained a lot of knowledge about that. And it was really disturbing.

Ewa (25 y.o.), a PhD student, who both studies and teaches climate change, elaborates:

I would love to have everyone learn, teach about climate change. But in the same time, (…) my anxiety just increased when I learned more about climate change. And I really feel that it works like that. If you know too much, well, maybe not too much, if you know about the scale of the problem, you probably will feel the higher anxiety. And so at the same time, we should probably have the really good ways to take care of students.

Alma (24 y.o.) reports studying sustainable tourism made her aware of many problems; she did not understand before in such depth, and mentions knowledge as impacting climate anxiety in more than one way:

(…) And then on the other hand (…) as I also know about more problems now I also know about more solutions now and more and more ideas what can be solutions and ways how things can be handled and then of course there’s this middle thing where I feel like okay we have these solutions but where to get from the problem to the solution? (…) So I would say kind of both increasing and decreasing I don’t know if it’s possible at the same time.

Experiences and expectations toward the university environment

“Almost no one takes it seriously.” Climate anxiety is triggered by a lack of adequate action, including in academia.

For most students’ experiences of climate distress were triggered by a lack of adequate action at different levels. It began with mundane experiences, such as waste recycling efforts (waste was sorted by students at university grounds but then dumped together and not recycled further), to perceived widespread hypocrisy undermining trust in official actions by large agents such as companies and governments. Lucas (22 y.o.) states: “Everyone says they do something, but it’s clearly not enough, and they’re actually not really.”

For Sigrid (24 y.o.) the best cure for students’ anxiety would be real action: “What would reduce the connection, the anxiety would be our university taking a very, very harsh stand where we go on the road of sustainability and then the government taking the same stance (…)” and she commented on the need for structural change: “that disconnect between what we need to do, what seems to be possible to do, and where it’s not on the consumer, or it’s not on the individual, but it needs to be a structural change.” Ewa (25 y.o.) is disillusioned about the insufficient depth of action by her university: “What really triggers me is that so many people who lead our university just do not have any knowledge about climate change. They talk about things like just turning off lights and we can save our planet.” For students’ inadequate actions, misleading in scale and form including prioritizing individual responsibility, but not pursuing systemic transformation, undermine trust in the collective possibility of climate change mitigation. This is similar to previous research on young people’s voices, where the idea of adults and policymakers falling to take adequate actions was seen as a primary driver of anxiety and disillusionment (Hickman, 2020; Hickman et al., 2021; Jones & Davison, 2021).

Community of practice. Peer community, teachers as mentors, and time.

Students’ ideas to improve university operations include a call for a more personal and deeper educational community centered on global challenges. This would mean smaller study groups, and smaller campuses, together with a connection that is more human and deep. Krystyna (25 y.o.) explains: “I think that faculties should be smaller and people should know each other and people should have time to talk with each other.” A recurring issue was time, time in seminars, and time to talk:

There’s such a limited time. Usually, there are quite a lot of readings. One never really gets into the kind of depth of the reading and if a reading also generates emotions, which I think sustainability papers do (…) So many times, it was just surface level. (Maja, 43 y.o.)

The most important type of learning community was the one among peers. Lili (22 y.o.) mentions nature and sports as helpful, but remembers her similarity to peers as crucial in coping: “I was in a mind-set similar to my other classmates, mostly most of them.” Sigrid also puts peers in the foreground: “The only channel that has maybe worked (for climate anxiety) has been discussions with fellow students. (…) I think discussing the subject matters together with people who are in the same position is the best therapeutic.”

Teachers were seen as important sources of support, and in general, students could remember many positive experiences with teachers’ responsiveness to climate emotions, even if some contradicting experiences were also reported, especially in studies that are more technical. Teachers’ time was seen as a special resource. Maja (43 y.o.) remarks quite ironically: “I think in an ideal university, all the teachers should have like two lives with separate amounts of time where they can do their research, have their personal lives, and be available to students and their needs.” Fiona (25 y.o.) connects missing time to the general university culture: “I get the feeling that sometimes the university is a little time-poor” and elaborates about the most important things, including climate-friendly transformations, being not done due to lack of time.

Ewa (25 y.o.) sums up this thread by invoking the idea of an imagined community of practice. This community would include togetherness and integrity, where all, including not only students but also teachers would be taken care of:

So creating communities where people can talk about it (…) mentors is also an important thing. (…) should those mentors be for students or teachers also? (…) Maybe teachers need to be supervised by others. Creating some actions which people could join. Every faculty can have its own climate change actions from the small ones to the big ones. So from changing their restaurants to the vegetarian ones or even vegans to this kind of things like to just creating more natural spaces in the university or something like that or leading some courses for schools or something like that. Actions that can make the communities closer. (…). There is a nice term, the community of practice.

“It should not only be technical education.” Emotion work in academia.

The above call for a more integral community on the university grounds was closely linked to the idea that an ideal university would host emotions work parallel to intellectual work. Krystyna (25 y.o.) regrets sustainability and environmental studies are: “technological, yes, biological, but they are not humanistic at all.” Furthermore, she elaborates:

What do you know about climate change, for example? And it shouldn’t be only a technical, biological point of view. It should be also talking about feelings, about philosophy, as I said. It is important, I think, to understand this problem holistically.

Alma (24 y.o.) comments on emotions and university: “So I think it’s also quite new to mix or to allow emotions in academia and I think it should be obvious because academia is done by humans who have emotions with everything that they do.” Daria (28 y.o.) shares a similar idea: “This component of managing emotions is really in a shadow zone in higher education in general. It’s time maybe to make it better.”

“Relying on nature when nature needs help seems a little bit hypocritical.” Paradoxes of nature-based coping.

The accounts of imagined ideal academia in the context of climate anxiety involved, not surprisingly, the call for more nature in and around campus. Many students agreed on the healing aspects of being in nature. For example, Maja (43 y.o.) praises natural green surroundings: “It is the best place to be for anxiety. Walking in nature is calming, it’s reassuring …” but she comments on the limits of this: “… until the particular type of nature is changing too much because of climate change.” Daria (28 y.o.) has an even stronger opinion about flight into nature as coping, highlighting it can serve as a sedative, a distraction toward long-term climate goals:

But I guess if nothing of this (climate action) happens, then one can try to connect more to nature. I think it helps here and now. If you really have bad moments, it can reduce the stress. But overall, in the long run, when nature will get smaller and smaller and the air will get dirtier and dirtier. (…) I don’t know, relying on nature when nature needs help seems a little bit hypocritical to me.

However, even taking these paradoxes into account, nature both indoors and outdoors, spontaneous use of green classrooms, also campus opportunities for sports and healthy living, were seen by students as helpful in terms of campus spaces, easing the problem of climate distress.

Discussion and conclusions

Results from this study confirm that climate anxiety is present among university students involved in sustainability related fields of study. They also affirm this type of anxiety can at times be severe, stronger than other typical students’ worries, for example related to studying or personal life. In sustainability studies, the process and the content of learning are closely connected, and that is why climate anxiety as a larger stressor takes priority here. Students represent climate related emotions as a complex of anxiety, sadness, anger, guilt, frustration, hopelessness, and helplessness. This is in line with findings of the largest and most international survey of climate anxiety in young people by Hickman et al. (2021) where over 50% of respondents felt afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty. On the other hand, among the most prevalent emotions in our case, eagerness and hope were also recalled. Identification of these emotions highlights that the majority of our respondents regard their climate related emotions as a mixture of empowering and stressing states. This result corresponds to previous studies and theoretical considerations (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022; Ojala, 2015; Pihkala, 2020; Skilling et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2020). These results suggest the importance of normalizing climate anxiety in higher education and using it as a motivational, supportive background for transformative learning and sustainability education (Marks & Hickman, 2023; Wallace et al., 2020).

Supporting the quantitative part of this study, qualitative analysis revealed climate anxiety experience among students as dynamic, evolving over time, multifaceted, and mixed with other emotions (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022; Ojala, 2015; Pihkala, 2020; Skilling et al., 2023). Climate anxiety was not evaluated by participants as a mainly clinical anxiety problem, nor was it seen as uniformly negative, even if all agreed it can be difficult and burdening (Kurth & Pihkala, 2022; Ojala, 2015; Pihkala, 2020; Skilling et al., 2023). Anxiety was especially seen as constructive if it motivated further climate-action or transformative community building with peers, or was an expression of personal values and empathy (Hickman, 2020). This corresponds well to the results of the quantitative portion of the study and is similar to the idea of transgressive and transformative learning, aimed at deeper change (Ojala, 2016). In this type of learning, teachers and learners need to acknowledge the paradoxical coexistence of contrasting emotions such as hope and fear (Pihkala, 2020). They also need to understand dynamic trajectories and evolution of emotion as learners confront the process of change and search for solutions to environmental problems (Ojala, 2015; Skilling et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2020). Longitudinal studies (Sciberras & Fernando, 2022) can be helpful in understanding this process.

This kind of deep learning experience was described earlier in the literature as learning to “live with climate change” (Verlie, 2019) meaning one has to relearn to live in a climate-change world and cope with this condition, possibly in a personally and socially constructive way. On the road to transformation, negative emotions such as anxiety, but also anger and loss, are not coped with by denying their existence, or medicalizing them (Pihkala, 2020; Skilling et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2020). They are welcomed as part of a transformative learning process, or what Haraway (2016) termed “staying with the trouble.” In their narratives, students stressed the burdensome nature of climate emotions; at the same time, they normalized these emotions as part of a process of personal struggle with one of the most complex contemporary challenges. Importantly, norms (Howard, 2022) allowing for negative emotionality around climate change can build an affective pathway toward engagement, one that is increasingly recognized as important.

In terms of students’ expectations toward academia, there was a connection between studying climate change academically and the need for a supportive, personal, slow-paced, humane educational environment. Students acknowledged the need for time and depth in classroom conversations around climate change, valued the opportunity to create peer communities, to have support and mentoring from teachers, but also acknowledged teachers may need support, since climate change concerns everyone. This fits into the perspective of acknowledging and valuing climate education as involving emotional work, as a set of activities aiming to better understand and manage emotions of educational actors (both teachers and students) in university classrooms. Accepting difficult emotions, creating holding space for anxiety and different ways of coping with it, sharing personal stories and listening to them, opening space for unsettling content but also for hope and enthusiasm, are all examples of emotion work (Ojala, 2015; Wallace et al., 2020). Doing this type of work requires training, mentoring and support for teachers (Verlie et al., 2021). Universities are likely to encounter structural challenges such as teachers’ workload, time, and funding on the road to meet these goals (Thierry et al., 2023).

Moreover, students expected universities to take more meaningful climate action, and to create room for community work on campuses and beyond them. This is in line with earlier research demonstrating young people’s perception of institutional inaction (all talk, no action) as disempowering and distressing (Hickman, 2020; Pihkala, 2020; Thierry et al., 2023). Nature indoors and outdoors was seen as an important source of support for students’ mental health, but not as the ultimate solution to climate challenges. The importance of nature is often stressed in sustainability education given the nature deficit many students experience (Edwards et al., 2023). However, the possibility of outdoor education can be limited by various contextual issues such as weather and location of campuses, with, for example, several campuses in Asia and Pacific experiencing difficulties with being outside due to the heat. Making campuses greener inside helps only partially, as some activities are only possible outside. Access to nature is thus an emergent area in complex issues of privilege and inequality in education (Hickman, 2020, Skilling et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2020).

In terms of limitations, this study provides insight into experiences of students from three Western and Middle European campuses from the Baltic Sea region. It should be interpreted as a local example because the types of climate experiences as well as academic and emotion cultures are diverse not only globally, but also within Europe. More culturally sensitive studies from various global regions are needed, including special focus on inequality and privilege. In the future, experiences of students enrolled in different programs such as humanities or natural science should also be studied separately because their needs and academic cultures are very heterogeneous, especially regarding emotions. An important future direction is to study educational trajectories of persons with climate anxiety longitudinally. Several consequences for practice are implicated from this study. First, in response to the challenge posed by students’ climate anxiety, higher education institutions should rethink their operations to build spaces for emotions and acknowledge emotional work (Pihkala, 2020; Ray, 2018; Skilling et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2020). Universities should also rethink their time economies, to prioritize the most important tasks, among them transformative climate action and interdisciplinary in-depth climate education. Second, students expect the educational environment around sustainability issues to be in-depth and on a human scale, involving personal contact between teachers and learners, and creating different forms of educational communities. Teachers and learners need to support each other in the process of transformative learning via dialogue, training, emotional education, supervision, and mentoring. Finally, including more-than-human-nature and outdoor education in academia may enhance the process, by enriching it and supporting students’ mental health. In this type of educational environment implementing transformative learning to redefine climate anxiety from paralyzing emotion into constructive learning would be not only be desirable, but also possible.

We all live in a post-normal world threatened by wicked global problems, with climate change as one of them. Under these conditions, climate anxiety should be normalized as it represents an adaptive response to the challenges of our living on Earth (Kemkes & Akerman, 2019; Verlie, 2019; Verlie et al., 2021). Climate anxiety should be taken out of the “shadow zone” and accepted in higher education, as it provides a potential to enhance education for sustainable development by shaping students as agents of positive change in society through transformative learning.

Authors’ contributions

Conceptualization, data collection—O.K.; methodology, quantitative data analysis—O.K.; qualitative data analysis—M.B.; writing (original draft preparation, review and editing)—both authors; project administration and funding acquisition—O.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version.

Acknowledgements

We thank Panu Pihkala, Jaanika Blomster, and Risto Willamo from the University of Helsinki for help with the data collection as well as all participating students and their teachers for contributing to this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, O. Khalaim. The data are not publicly available due to containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

The study is performed within the research project „Balancing the Climate and Mental Health Threats: Climate Anxiety Identification in Higher Education Institutions” supported by the internal funding of disciplinary domain of Medicine and Pharmacy of Uppsala University, Sweden.