Measuring Eco-anxiety, or Not

Key points

Human-caused environmental change is seen as leading to eco-anxiety and climate change anxiety.

Scales and indices are being developed and applied to measure these psychological responses.

Efforts to define, identify, and quantify eco-anxiety might themselves influence it.

As human activities alter local-to-global environments, people are reporting stress , distress, depression , anxiety , worry, psychological trauma , and other negative emotions. Phrases coined to describe these responses include solastalgia , eco-anxiety , climate change anxiety, climate fear , and ecological grief .

Scientifically, all these ideas are in their infancy. To improve understanding and to really get to the basics of how human beings respond to different environmental changes