Toward a unified understanding of climate anxiety: Examining measures of climate and eco-anxiety

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339562 December 29, 2025 14 / 19 (e.g., global warming, ecological degradation, resource depletion, species extinction, ozone hole, pollution of the oceans, deforestation)?” Thus, it may well be that climate change is the more dominant concept in people’s minds and that other environmental threats are overread in the introduction, so climate change–related anxiety is also more dominant in this scale. However, fully resolving this conceptual question requires additional quantitative and qualitative research to clarify which climate and/or environmental issues respondents actually think about when completing these scales, and whether they differentiate between them at all. For now, we define the overarching construct measured by both scales as climate anxiety and conclude that the CAS and HEAS items do not measure fundamentally different constructs but rather assess a single overarching construct. The third learning from this study resulted from validity analyses of the overarching climate anxiety factor in a nomological network of related traits. The study revealed a moderate correlation between climate anxiety and neu- roticism, aligning with previous research assessing the relation to depression and anxiety [9,12,20,21,24,27–29] and neuroticism [25,64]. However, the correlation was rather weak, suggesting that while neuroticism, as a stable per- sonality trait, can predispose individuals to heightened climate anxiety, its expression may depend on the contextual

activation of climate change–related information. Climate anxiety showed a limited correlation with the perception of climate-related health risks, emphasizing that these are distinct constructs with potentially varying impacts on climate action and coping behavior [65,66]. Notably, climate change–related fatigue did not correlate with climate anxiety. Self-efficacy to show individual emission-reducing behaviors displayed a small positive association with climate anx- iety. In summary, our results of a small positive correlation with self-efficacy and no association with fatigue, together with low rates of climate anxiety in the general population, suggest that people in general are not currently paralyzed by climate anxiety. This contrasts with media portrayals [e.g., 67]. In theorizing, climate anxiety is attributed to both a paralyzing and a motivating effect on pro-environmental behaviors [10,11,34], and the data suggest that this relation may be more complex [66,68–70]. In sum, previous and the current analyses warrant deeper investigation of poten- tial moderators. Interestingly, between the overarching climate anxiety factor and readiness for climate action, we found no substantial associations, including no relations with the two specific factors of individual behavior and policy acceptance. Using other measures to assess readiness factors, previous studies have reported small associations with policy support [9] and small to moderate correlations with individual pro-environmental behavior [25,29,37,71]. The fact that we found no such

associations might be attributed to the different measurement approaches used in this study, which allow for the disentan- glement of the readiness for climate action in general and its orthogonal modeled indicators [41]. Moreover, we integrated only the individual behaviors that have the greatest impact in terms of individual CO2 emissions (e.g., living conditions) that are harder to change than low emission behaviors, which have often been included in previous studies (e.g., dispos- ing, recycling, and waste behavior [29,71]). Finally, we found a very strong correlation between climate anxiety and the specific political participation factor. Other studies have also reported that climate anxiety is more strongly associated with activism than with individual emission- related behavior [28,38]. However, our results do not allow for causal claims, and both potential directions of influence must be considered. On the one hand, political participation may heighten climate anxiety, as engaging in activism often involves increased exposure to discussions about climate change and its negative consequences. On the other hand, individual differences in climate anxiety may drive varying levels of political participation. A recent longitudinal study on the bidirectional relationship between climate worry and climate activism found evidence for both pathways, with a stronger effect of climate worry increasing the likelihood of political engagement in climate activism [72].

In sum, both previous studies and the current work have identified a lack of comprehensive definitions of the core con- structs [10,11]; floor effects and restricted variance in the outcome variable (e.g., [6,7,12,29]); a lack of clarity in the factor structure [20]; reservations about whether the emotional core of climate anxiety is captured, especially in the Climate Anxiety Scale [9]; and finally, the insight that the two existing measures cover the same overarching construct.