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Navigating Climate Anxiety: Signals of Coping and Connection

  • Writer: horizonshiftlab
    horizonshiftlab
  • Feb 13
  • 12 min read

Updated: Mar 14

A tornado spins violently on a grassy plain, casting debris into the air under dark, ominous clouds. A dirt road leads towards the storm.
Source: Pixabay.com (stock image)

We know climate anxiety is real—and it’s growing. Searches for the term are skyrocketing, and studies show that over half of young people feel deeply worried about climate change. In this episode, we explore signals of how people are collectively processing eco-anxiety and climate grief. From the rise of climate cafés—spaces for sharing fears—to the growing role of eco-chaplains in fostering emotional resilience, we examine how communities are coming together to navigate uncertainty. We also discuss how people are turning to ritual to honor disappearing landscapes. Join us as we explore emerging signals of collective care and how people are processing the emotional impact of climate change.





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Episode Transcript:

Sue: Welcome to Signal Shift, by Horizon Shift Lab. We're your hosts, Lana Price, Raakhee Natha, and Sue Chi. Each episode, we explore the latest signals in technology, culture, and society, uncovering insights that will impact our daily lives in the future. Join us as we shift perspectives, explore possibilities, and delve into real changes in our world. Curious to learn more? Go to horizonshiftlab.com.


[0:40 Understanding Climate Anxiety]


Sue: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Signal Shift. OK, I want to talk today about climate anxiety because I don't know about you guys, but I have definitely been feeling it. I think a lot of people have as well. 


And if you type “climate anxiety” into any search bar today, you're going to see some of the same statistics, right. Google is reporting that it's just a significant increase and it's continuing to trend upwards in terms of global searches, multiple languages. And there's actually an often-cited study that's been showing of 10,000 youth surveyed globally, 60 % reported that they were extremely worried about climate change and nearly half reported that it affects their daily functioning every day. So it's definitely a problem. 


The American Psychological Association even has an official term for it. They call it eco-anxiety, and it's a chronic fear of environmental doom. And it has a lot of other clinical terms after that as well. 


There's now a handbook for climate psychology, right? So people are really starting to address this as a serious issue. 


And so I'm looking at all these news articles, reading these trends, and I only see one direction this is going to go. Right. So if it's really going to be that widespread, you know, there have to be more solutions out there for all the different types of impacts that climate anxiety or eco-anxiety is having on our lives. And, you know, for a long time, I've been treating this as an individual, like what can I do? But there's got to be more solutions because so many people are feeling this. 


So my question for you both, Lana and Raakhee, is I'm really curious in the signal search -- did you find any practical solutions? Are there any surprising signals that you're finding for the future? Anything scalable? I would really love to know. So yeah, what signals did you bring today? 


[2:45 Climate Solutions: Climate cafés]


Raakhee: Yeah, Raakhee here, I'd love to share. This isn't something, you might have heard of it, it's not something that's like groundbreakingly new or innovative, but it's been growing in the last few years and it's called a climate café. Now you might have heard of the concept of these cafés. They pop up sort of conversational setups that happen. 


People do them a lot in the corporate sphere. I used to do them. One's called “Day in the Life of” or “World Cafés” where you try to learn about other people or their lives in a day. So I think it borrows from that sort of methodology. 


But a climate café is basically being, it's locally, it's community organized. It's just the coming together of people to really get together and discuss and share their climate anxiety. 


So a bit different to kind of traditional therapy or something like that, but still a space and a container where it's safe to say, okay, let's talk about this. And I think it's really powerful in the sense that one, you're facing the reality of what it is, but doing that with your own community and friends and other people, I think lets you know you're not alone. 


So there's a lot of good things to coming together in this sort of way to talk about something like climate. 


You know, they're not political, they're not organized by any specific group, they are not for profit. They're simply just, it's a concept and anybody can start one, you can start one in any city, any town. 


And they've been growing, they've been growing a lot. I saw something that said the Climate Psychology Alliance in North America has trained about 350 people to run climate cafés in the US and Canada. And it has 300 clinicians in its climate sort of aware therapist directory. This is just one sort of angle of looking at the data. 


It's really hard to say how many are happening, but if you go online, you speak to people, it's becoming a term that people are very accustomed to, right? They know what a climate café is. So they're really growing. You will find, I found a couple for LA, so something I could do. So you will find them. I think what excites me about this for the future, I think it's going to continue to grow. 


It’s that you can bring, I think, technology, right? Like using advanced technology integration to see like more of the real-time effects that are happening, to see more data, and to also use it for skills-building in these sessions to say, okay, this is coming. 


I think about the fires we've just been through. Yeah, and so teaching people kind of skills of, okay, this is what you do in the situation of a climate disaster. So... 


Nothing groundbreakingly innovative and yet I think a very powerful form of organizing that is going to continue to be really popular. 


Sue: Thanks, Raakhee. Yeah, Climate café is interesting. And it's funny because I saw some of those signals this week and I thought, I bet someone's going to bring this up. 


I will say, I actually tried to sign up for a Climate café. There was a wait list. I can't get into one until April. So they're definitely in demand. At least it seems so. Very interesting. Lana, I see shock on your face-- what reaction do you have. 


Lana: Yeah, no, I mean, I just think that's, I guess that says something in and of itself, right? That you wanted, like, you found it, you tried to sign up, and there's a wait list. So that sort of says it all. 


Raakhee: Yeah, you can start one. So there's also that, like, you can also, you know, we need more. So we definitely need more. 


Sue: Yeah, definitely. Lana, how about you? What's your signal? 


[6:30 The Grief of Climate Change]


Lana: I think mine's kind of related. So I, what I wanted to talk about, this is a cousin to anxiety, because, you know, anxiety is a very future oriented emotion because we're anticipating, right, a threat before it arrives. But there's another related emotion, which is grief. And so grief is usually tied to the past, but it can also emerge as we watch loss unfold, like in real time. 


And so there's a term for this and it's called solastalgia. And it's the, I think this is a really beautiful phrasing. “It's the homesickness you feel when you're still at home.” And so it's when a place that you belong to is like vanishing before your eyes. 


And so, you know, the signals that I found is looking at how we're really beginning to ritualize climate grief. 


And so two things I wanted to talk about. One is like researchers from Rice University, held a memorial at the Glacier Graveyard in Iceland. And so it was an installation and it was a ceremony. And they had 15 headstones carved from ice. And each headstone was bearing the name of a vanished glacier. And so as the ice melted, it mirrors the loss that it represents, which is we're mourning not just the past, all the glaciers that have melted, but we're also mourning that that continues to happen. 


And so we're also entering this pre-emptive mourning. And so we see this in last chance tourism. 


So people are really like flocking to places like Venice, the Great Barrier Reef, the Arctic, because they wanna see it before it's gone. And so we are like actively visiting places that we expect to lose. 


And so these lawyers actually, they wrote a paper in the Florida State University Law Review that said that...  public land managers, so the people who manage public parks, and specifically these places that are really under threat, they need to really account for ecological grief in their planning. Because being a steward of a place is not just about conservation, but it's really honoring people's deep personal connections to that land. 


I know we had an episode a few months ago about funerals, like the future of funerals. And so this is really kind of similar in that the public land managers are almost like the death doulas of disappearing places. They're considering what does it mean for the end of life of a place and how do we manage that? 


So this brings up questions like, they call it the “last visitor problem,” which is like, if demand surges, who should have priority access to these places? You know, like, should it be scientists? Should it be indigenous communities, children, or like the elderly? You know, how do we ensure that the final visitors also aren't like inadvertently contributing to the destruction of the place that they've come to witness? 


So I guess this is like, you know, I think, Raakhee, exactly to your point, like, there's this big need to hold space, right, for our emotions, and to process them in a way where we're doing it together as a community, versus kind of like individually on our own. 


And so, you know, I think for me, this really brought up, like, what does it mean to say goodbye, right, to places that we really cherish and hold dear to us. And then there's also sort of this weird thing about like saying goodbye before it's actually gone. Right? And so, yeah, so sort of brings up a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of different emotions underpinning that. but yeah, I think it's, it's worth talking about. 


Sue: That's really moving, Lana. I I feel like I'm tearing up even just putting myself in those places of this idea of a last chance to be in a place before it goes away and just seeing that entire process. So thanks for sharing that. 


You mentioned doula, which was interesting because I found in one of the terms this sense of an eco-doula, which I think has very similar linkages to what you were talking about in terms of death doulas in our previous episode. So I thought that was really interesting. 


[11:53 Emerging Roles: Eco-Chaplains]


Sue: And I think that leads to the last signal, which I think rounds out very, very well with what both of you have talked about. And Raakhee, you talked about climate cafés. Lana, you're talking about this grief. I found that there is now a rise in what they're calling eco-chaplains. 


So if you think of chaplaincy, these are people of religious orders that work in private or public institutions. So a lot of times you'll see a chaplain at a hospital, in the military, in prisons for example. 


And I saw this feature in NPR that said that basically chaplains are really wanting to deal with eco-grief in their chaplaincy that a lot of people want to talk about it. There's actually a Center in Maine that hosted a session for chaplains interested in talking more about climate. And they thought, we'll get 10 people to sign up, but 80 people signed up that are actually interested in this. And they said they came from all different backgrounds. 


So there were what they're calling disaster chaplaincy, chaplains from hospitals, universities, and others in general, spiritual care. And they come from all types of religious backgrounds. They had mentioned from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and also just people who are not associated with a particular institutional religion, but you know, feel very spiritual. 


And so they're working with two different groups, essentially, right? One is this older generation where they're experiencing grief or a sense of loss from maybe their career is no longer relevant, their health related issues, and just the general idea of aging, right? Alongside everything that they're going through. 


They also mentioned this, like just the sense of all their efforts for those who are engaged in environmental advocacy, just feeling like it's failed. And so they're dealing with those issues while they're also working with younger generations who are forward-facing and thinking about what does my life look like in this era of all of this climate crisis? How is this going to affect my life going forward? And so they're trying to deal with these kind of different emotions and different experiences that people are going through. 


I just thought it was really interesting, because going into these other signals, which I think we can open it up now, is really this sense of needing to be with other people, talk it out with others, and just maybe it's around that sense of grief. 


So I'm really curious for you all, what is this bringing up for you, this sense of gathering at these kind of last chance tourism places, or even facilitating or joining some of the climate cafés. Yeah, what feelings and thoughts are these bringing up for you? 


[14:54 Rituals and Collective Mourning]


Raakhee: Yeah, I think what I find really interesting is this return to ritual, which traditionally all cultures have had. And we just became such a modernized society that moved so far away from that. And I think maybe even trivialized the need for those things in our lifestyles. And what's the importance of that? 


I mean, I've certainly seen that in my own life, growing up with a lot of ritual and culture, which my mother ensured we had, and then really losing that into your adult life, which is true for many people. I think that's really powerful. I think it speaks to all of that, right? Whether we're mourning a piece of land, whether we're coming together to celebrate what's left in the time we have with a piece of land in a particular part of the world. But I think I'm picking up something here around a return to rituals and that importance of gathering and meaning in gathering. 


Sue: Thanks, Raakhee. Yeah, I feel exactly the same about this idea of ritual. That's a really great point of these practices that we need to come back to. Lana, what have you been thinking about this? 


Lana: Yeah, I feel, you know, I think what that connection that you're, I think both making is this, how we're seeing the climate and connecting it to a spiritual experience and like a sense of something that's bigger than us, that's beyond us, but that we also might need to like call in some higher power support. 


And, and, you know, that, you know, whether it's collectively, like, you know, in the cafés or with, more spiritual guidance, that it's just such a big thing and, so many big feelings, I guess, that we've named. And so, and so yeah, think that's sort of what's coming up for me. What about you Sue? 


Sue:Yeah, I think one thing I read was how some of these practices are also harkening back to practices that Indigenous communities have had for a really long time. Again, just honoring places and ritual for things that are going away, too. And so I would love to just understand what those look like as well and how that's really helped community throughout just the span of time that they've been doing this. So I thought that was really interesting. 


[17:54 Non-Attachment and Shared Memories]


Raakhee: Yeah, I think that it's interesting when, with the fires earlier this year. We now know multiple people who've lost their homes, right? So I can't imagine that. Yeah, anyone who has a home or buys a home here doesn't understand the risk of that. 


And so I think the one thing as a value maybe as people is this value of non-attachment. And I think that can be really powerful. It's not easy. I'm not going to put it out there like, wow, mastered this. But if we cannot be attached to one of the most expensive things we'd spend our money and our life, you'd still have the land. But you do lose the house. You lose the memories. 


I think that non-attachment is gonna, yeah, I think that as a value changes just basically how we think about the things that we own or have in our lives and how we value it with the time we have with it and how we attach, not attach, going back to the spirituality, but I like non-attachment as a value, Sue, so yeah. 


Sue: Yeah, very interesting. Hard, personally hard to do. But I do think there's something in these found objects that you're talking about that I was also thinking is related to some of the gatherings that we're seeing that as things even go away, you know, will the few remains of, you know, what you have, whether it's like a special native species, for example, like all those memories will be in that one artifact that you can gather and kind of collectively share. 


So yeah, I think we'll have to just see and pick and choose and select like which are these that really bring in more meaning, what has more shared value with others. So I thought that was really beautiful.


Well, to those listening, I wonder how have you been dealing with anxiety related to climate change? Are you finding anything that has been helping or that gives you a more hopeful vision of the future? Because I think right now we all need to share what those things are and how they're working for you all. But thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. We'll be back next week. 


As always, if you have comments or questions, please go to our website, horizonshiftlab.com and sign up for updates or leave us a message. So thank you so much and see you next week. 


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