ArticleRoyal Society open science2025
Does concern regarding climate change impact subsequent mental health? A longitudinal analysis using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).
Article in Royal Society open science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The causality problem in climate anxiety research.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2026Article
- Perception of scientific uncertainty about climate change and associations with anxiety and maternal-fetal attachment among pregnant women.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Does concern regarding climate change impact subsequent mental health? A longitudinal analysis using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).Royal Society open science · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
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
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