Major-Smith Daniel, Halstead Isaac, Major-Smith Katie
Centre for Academic Child Health, Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, Denmark.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Aug 6;12(8):251099. doi: 10.1098/rsos.251099. eCollection 2025 Aug.
Climate change is having a substantial-and increasingly severe-impact on our planet, affecting people's health, security and livelihoods. As a consequence, the concept of 'climate anxiety' has recently been developed to characterize the psychological and emotional impact of concern over climate change. However, whether climate anxiety-or less extreme manifestations such as climate concern-impacts subsequent mental health is uncertain. Numerous studies have identified an association between climate anxiety and worse mental health, but as most of this research is cross-sectional it is impossible to infer the direction of causation (e.g. does climate anxiety cause broader mental health, or do broader mental health problems cause climate anxiety, or is there bidirectional causation?). In this paper, we used longitudinal data from young adults (aged approx. 30 years old) in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) based in the UK. We first aimed to answer the following research question: does concern regarding climate change cause subsequent mental health? Our outcomes were a range of validated mental health scales for depression, anxiety and well-being, and analyses adjusted for a range of baseline confounders and prior mental health to try and estimate an unbiased causal effect. As a second research question, we explored whether the association between climate concern and mental health is moderated by whether participants engage in climate action and whether they believe that individual actions can mitigate the impacts of climate change. We found little evidence for a causal effect of climate concern on subsequent mental health or well-being, or for moderation of this relationship by these climate change beliefs and behaviours. Our results suggest that-in this population of young adults in the UK, at least-concerns regarding climate change do not, on average, appear to cause subsequent mental health issues. However, we stress that these results apply only to , and may not be generalizable to more extreme manifestations of .
气候变化正在对我们的星球产生重大且日益严重的影响，影响着人们的健康、安全和生计。因此，“气候焦虑”这一概念最近被提出，用以描述对气候变化的担忧所产生的心理和情绪影响。然而，气候焦虑——或者不那么极端的表现形式，如气候担忧——是否会影响随后的心理健康尚不确定。许多研究已经确定了气候焦虑与较差的心理健康之间存在关联，但由于这项研究大多是横断面研究，因此无法推断因果关系的方向（例如，是气候焦虑导致更广泛的心理健康问题，还是更广泛的心理健康问题导致气候焦虑，或者是否存在双向因果关系？）。在本文中，我们使用了来自英国埃文亲子纵向研究（ALSPAC）中约30岁的年轻人的纵向数据。我们首先旨在回答以下研究问题：对气候变化的担忧是否会导致随后的心理健康问题？我们的结果是一系列经过验证的用于衡量抑郁、焦虑和幸福感的心理健康量表，并针对一系列基线混杂因素和先前的心理健康状况进行了分析，以尝试估计无偏因果效应。作为第二个研究问题，我们探讨了气候担忧与心理健康之间的关联是否会因参与者是否采取气候行动以及他们是否相信个人行动可以减轻气候变化的影响而受到调节。我们几乎没有发现证据表明气候担忧对随后的心理健康或幸福感有因果效应，也没有发现这些气候变化信念和行为对这种关系有调节作用。我们的结果表明，至少在英国的这群年轻人中，对气候变化的担忧平均而言似乎不会导致随后的心理健康问题。然而，我们强调这些结果仅适用于 ，可能不适用于 的更极端表现形式。
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