Climate Anxiety and Agency: General Attitudes and Individual Experiences of Emerging Professionals in the Environmental Field

Abstract

This thesis concerns the intersection between the continuously aggravated climate crisis and the increase in climate anxiety and its potential ‘paralysing’- or motivational effects. This can be understood as a dilemmatic, as on the one hand we are in an increasing need of professionals to enforce adaptation and mitigation efforts. On the other hand, research shows that students within the environmental field are more likely to experience distress due to climate change, which in turn bear the potential repercussions of ‘eco-paralysis’. With this question in mind, the aim of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of how climate anxiety connects to environmentally-focused education as well as its effects on students’ experiences of agency in the context of the current climate crisis. In order to understand general attitudes of students in the environmental field, as well as individual experiences of the complex and increasingly common phenomena of climate anxiety, this study utilises a mixed method approach, with quantitative cross-sectional data, as well as qualitative empirics from a focus-group. This thesis found that university students within the environmental field experience significantly heightened levels of climate anxiety, and experience moderate to high levels of collective agency when it comes to climate change mitigation efforts. As a complex cognitive and emotional response to the climate crisis we are facing, climate anxiety is experienced varyingly among individuals, and fluctuates during the extended occupation with environmental issues, depending on factors such as engagement in climate action and sense of personal or collective agency.