Studies show that young people are concerned about the global future, not least concerning climate change. It is their future that is at stake and young people around the world already today bear an unproportional burden of the ongoing climate crisis. In addition, young people can also be vital actors in society’s efforts both to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The worry and anxiety that many young people experience in relation to climate change can be positive motivational forces both for learning and engagement but are also associated with anxiety and depressive feelings in general. Due to the seriousness, scope, and existential character of the problem it is not surprising that studies also indicate that young people experience helplessness, and even hopelessness, in the face of climate change. Hopelessness, in the form that you feel that it is too late to do anything about the climate problem, might be a threat to learning, climate engagement, mental wellbeing, and could even be a threat towards democracy since it might seem as if there is no point in being an active citizen at all.
In my position as professor in socio-ecological resilience in the FRONT program at University of Oulu I together with colleagues aim to identify resilience factors at different levels – individual, social psychological, environmental, cultural, organizational, and structural – that can help young people live in an active way with their climate-change worry. We hope to identify factors that can turn difficult emotions about climate change into learning and an active citizenship, at the same time as mental wellbeing is preserved. Some of these factors are presented below.
Meaning-focused coping is a way to cope with climate-change by promoting positive emotions of for example hope that can reside side by side with worry. These can help young people to face difficult climate emotions and doing something about the problem. Young people who use meaning-focused coping to a high degree are more inclined to feel that they can influence the climate-change problem, act more climate friendly and score high on measures of life satisfaction, general positive affect, and low on general negative affect.
Meaning-focused coping consists of being able to acknowledge the problem but also switch perspective and acknowledge different positive aspects. Young people can, for example, argue that more and more people are knowledgeable about climate change or that humanity has solved difficult societal problems before and can handle climate change also. Another sub-aspect is to have trust in different actors like scientists and technological development, the global climate change movement, or one has met at least one politician that takes climate change seriously. By understanding that other often more powerful actors are also doing something can evoke a feeling that it is worthwhile being active oneself. In our team we want to explore if meaning-focused coping also functions in this way in a longitudinal context, that is, we follow senior high-school students during their three years in school, to investigate if meaning-focused coping motivates action and buffer worry from turning into low wellbeing.
Hope as agency work is another factor that our team is studying. Hope is said to contain an ability to come up with different pathways to reach a desirable future goal and accompanying positive emotions. However, hope also involves agency work. If a young person embraces a pathway toward a more sustainable future, for example trying to eat more climate friendly, there will occur a lot of conflicts. You can get tempted to eat beef although it is not good for the climate. You know that it is vital to not waste food but doubt that your actions will count in the big whole. If a young person succeeds in dealing with these conflicts in a constructive way this will motivate them to continue acting despite these conflicts. This process can be seen as hope as agency work.
Our team pinpoints different ways of coping with the kinds of conflicts that can occur when trying to live more sustainably and aim to get an in-depth understanding of the conflicts. We also pinpoint related emotions and coping. We do this through interviews and perhaps in the future through dairy studies.
Critical emotional awareness is yet a factor that might help young people to turn their difficult emotions concerning climate change into active citizenship. Climate emotions are not only individual but are also influenced by social factors such as emotion norms, culture, and power. Many actors try to influence which emotions people should feel in relation to climate change. It could be politicians who say that you should vote for them and then you do not need to worry because they will show the problem is a hoax, or companies who want to soothe your worry by selling you their products.
Also, one can wonder why many of us perceive climate-change emotions as signs of clinical phenomenon instead of normal political reactions to a very serious existential problem. This could lead to an individualization of societal problems and to affective injustice where important voices about the climate problem are silenced. We are planning future empirical studies that we hope will give young people a critical understanding about how emotions are steered and governed and that can make them less inclined to fall for attempts on, for example internet, to manipulate them.
If you want more information, please read these three articles:
Writer of this blog post is Maria Ojala, Professor of Socio-ecological Resilience, FRONT research programme, University of Oulu.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.