Innocenti, M., Von Gal, A., Piccardi, L., Carlson, J. M., Sampaio, F., & Aruta, J. J. B. (2026). Editorial: Climate change anxiety. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1812351. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1812351
Abstract:
Over the past decade, climate change anxiety has moved from a mainly conceptual and interdisciplinary concern to a rapidly expanding empirical field within environmental psychology, mental health, and behavioral science. Early scholarship helped establish that climate-related anxiety can be an intelligible and often non-clinical response to real ecological threats, while also recognizing that, in some cases, distress may become persistent, overwhelming, and functionally impairing. As the field developed, psychometric instruments and cross-cultural validation studies accelerated research output, but also made visible ongoing heterogeneity in definitions and operationalizations, including the boundaries between climate anxiety, climate worry, and broader climate emotions. More recently, large-scale population studies and quantitative syntheses have reinforced the public health relevance of this topic and highlighted the importance of conceptually precise, culturally sensitive, and justice-attentive approaches to assessment and interpretation.