Teachers are noticing rising climate anxiety among students and are adopting trauma-sensitive methods to support them.
Professional development for educators includes outdoor learning, interdisciplinary inquiry, and balanced climate action strategies.
Sharing hopeful stories and focusing on community-led climate initiatives helps nurture a forward-looking mindset.
Why this matters:
Climate change education that acknowledges and addresses students' emotional responses can foster resilience and hope. As young people face an uncertain future, equipping them with strategies to cope with climate trauma is essential for their mental health and engagement in meaningful climate action.
From “Don’t Look Up” to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.
There's no official clinical diagnosis, but the psychiatric and psychological communities have names for the phenomenon of worrying about the Earth's fate: “climate distress," “climate grief," “climate anxiety" or “eco-anxiety".
