Research Proposal – Climate Anxiety and Coping Among Young Australians

Introduction

Climate change is now an established feature of the Australian environmental and social landscape rather than a distant projection. The most recent national assessment records continued warming of the continent, longer fire seasons across southern and eastern Australia, and more intense short-duration rainfall (Bureau of Meteorology & CSIRO, 2024). These physical changes carry psychological consequences, and a growing body of research describes climate anxiety, sometimes termed eco-anxiety, as a cluster of worry, rumination, helplessness and anticipatory grief connected to environmental degradation and to perceptions of inadequate institutional response (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020; Hogg et al., 2021).

Australian young people occupy a particular position within this literature. Many have direct experience of compounding disasters, including the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and the 2022 Northern Rivers floods in New South Wales and south-east Queensland. The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements (2020) documented the cumulative, cascading nature of these events and noted that mental health consequences frequently persist well beyond the recovery of physical infrastructure. Longitudinal Australian evidence agrees: elevated posttraumatic stress and distress were still detectable in bushfire-affected Victorian communities several years on, and severity of exposure predicted persistence (Bryant et al., 2018).

This exposure sits on a baseline of considerable need. National data indicate that people aged 16-24 report the highest prevalence of twelve-month mental disorder of any age group in Australia, with almost two in five affected (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2023), and psychological distress among young Australians has trended upwards over the past decade (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [AIHW], 2024). How climate-related distress interacts with this baseline, and which coping responses protect against it, is a question of practical relevance for Australian service planning.

Problem Statement

Two problems limit the current evidence base for Australian policy. First, most large studies of youth climate anxiety are cross-national surveys that treat Australia as one comparison point among many (Hickman et al., 2021; Ogunbode et al., 2022), so they cannot speak to the variation produced by Australian disaster geography, in which a young person in the flood-hit Northern Rivers carries a very different exposure history from a peer in inner Melbourne. Second, the field has not resolved whether climate anxiety is a risk factor for poor mental health, a motivational precursor to environmental engagement, or both, with the outcome depending on how the individual copes. Australian work distinguishing eco-anxiety, eco-depression and eco-anger indicates that these responses diverge in their associations with wellbeing and action (Stanley et al., 2021), suggesting the coping process carries the explanatory weight. Without evidence on that process, prevention risks either pathologising a proportionate response to a genuine threat or overlooking young people who are struggling.

Aim and Research Questions

The proposed study aims to examine the prevalence of climate anxiety among Australians aged 16-25, and to test whether coping style conditions the relationship between climate anxiety and two outcomes: psychological distress and pro-environmental behaviour. Three research questions are posed:

1. What levels of climate anxiety do Australians aged 16-25 report, and how do these vary by disaster exposure history, remoteness and demographic characteristics?
2. What are the associations between climate anxiety, psychological distress and pro-environmental behaviour, both cross-sectionally and across a six-month interval?
3. Does coping style moderate those associations, such that adaptive coping weakens the association between climate anxiety and distress while avoidant coping strengthens it?

Literature Review

Measuring climate anxiety

Measurement has matured quickly. The Climate Change Anxiety Scale distinguishes cognitive-emotional impairment from functional impairment and has demonstrated sound internal consistency across samples (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020). The Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale (HEAS-13), developed with Australian participants, adds affective symptoms, rumination, behavioural symptoms and anxiety about personal impact as separable dimensions (Hogg et al., 2021). Two complementary instruments allow findings to be tested against a single operationalisation, a limitation of earlier descriptive work.

Coping styles and psychological outcomes

Coping research conventionally distinguishes problem-focused strategies, emotion-focused and meaning-focused strategies, and avoidant strategies such as denial, disengagement and substance use (Carver, 1997). For a stressor that is chronic, collective and only partially controllable by the individual, meaning-focused coping, which includes reframing, benefit-finding and the mobilisation of hope, is theorised to sustain wellbeing more effectively than narrowly problem-focused effort, while avoidance predicts poorer outcomes over time. This proposition has been tested extensively in health psychology but only sparingly in the climate context, and almost never in an Australian youth sample.

Climate distress and pro-environmental behaviour

Evidence on the behavioural correlates of climate anxiety is mixed. Across 32 countries, negative climate emotions were positively associated with pro-environmental behaviour yet negatively associated with mental wellbeing, indicating that the same emotional state can be simultaneously mobilising and burdensome (Ogunbode et al., 2022). Australian findings sharpen this picture: eco-anger predicted collective climate action without poorer wellbeing, whereas eco-anxiety and eco-depression predicted poorer wellbeing with weaker behavioural returns (Stanley et al., 2021). Coping style is the most plausible unmeasured mechanism explaining why some young people convert concern into action and others into withdrawal.

Youth mental health in the Australian service context

Any Australian study must be interpreted against known patterns of help-seeking. Young Australians report substantial unmet need, and awareness of youth-specific services such as headspace is high while sustained engagement remains lower, particularly among young men and those outside major cities (headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation, 2023; AIHW, 2024). Because much youth distress never reaches a service, prevalence drawn from clinical caseloads will understate the issue, strengthening the case for a community sample.

Taken together, the literature establishes that climate anxiety is measurable and prevalent, that its behavioural and psychological consequences diverge, and that coping is the theorised hinge between them. What is missing is an Australian study that measures exposure, appraisal, coping and outcomes in the same young people over time.

Theoretical Framework

The study is framed by the transactional model of stress and coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), in which stress is a property not of an event but of the transaction between person and environment. Primary appraisal establishes whether a stressor represents harm, threat or challenge; secondary appraisal evaluates the resources available to respond, including perceived control and social support; and coping efforts follow from that appraisal, feeding back through reappraisal.

The model suits climate stress for three reasons. It accommodates stressors that are chronic and anticipatory rather than discrete, unlike trauma models built around a single event. It treats appraisal as the point at which similar exposure produces divergent responses, explaining why two young people in the same flood-affected town may differ markedly in distress. Finally, it positions coping as a moderator rather than a fixed trait, making it a legitimate target for intervention. Figure 1 presents the resulting conceptual model.

Methodology

Design

A quantitative design is proposed, comprising a cross-sectional online survey of approximately 600 Australians aged 16-25, followed by a longitudinal wave administered six months after each participant completes the first. The follow-up permits temporal ordering that cross-sectional designs cannot establish, and tests whether coping style at Wave 1 predicts change in distress by Wave 2.

Participants and recruitment

Recruitment will use quota sampling to approximate the national distribution of the 16-25 age group by state and territory, gender and remoteness classification under the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ABS, 2023). Channels will include paid social media advertising, university and TAFE student associations, youth and community organisations, and disaster-affected community networks in the Northern Rivers, East Gippsland and the New South Wales South Coast. Regional and remote participants will be deliberately oversampled, since remoteness is associated with both higher disaster exposure and lower service access (AIHW, 2024).

Detecting a small increment in explained variance from an interaction term (f² = 0.02) requires approximately 410 participants at an alpha of .05 with power of .80 and twelve predictors. A target of 600 accommodates listwise deletion, subgroup comparison across remoteness categories, and an anticipated 70 per cent retention at follow-up, yielding roughly 420 participants at Wave 2.

Measures

All constructs will be assessed with validated instruments wherever available, as summarised in Table 1. Estimated completion time is 22 minutes.

Table 1: Constructs, instruments and their role in the analytic model

Note. The K10 is the distress measure used in national health collections, enabling comparison of sample scores with published Australian population benchmarks (ABS, 2023).

Procedure and analysis

The survey will be administered through a secure platform hosted on Australian servers. Research Question 1 will be addressed using analysis of variance to compare climate anxiety across exposure and remoteness categories. Research Question 2 will use hierarchical multiple regression, entering demographic covariates, then exposure, then climate anxiety, with separate models for distress and for pro-environmental behaviour. Research Question 3 will add mean-centred coping composites and their interaction terms with climate anxiety at the final step, probing significant interactions with simple slopes at one standard deviation above and below the mean. Wave 2 distress will then be modelled as residualised change, regressed on Wave 1 distress, climate anxiety and coping, isolating change rather than level.

Ethical Considerations and Participant Safeguarding

The project will be submitted for full review by the administering university’s Human Research Ethics Committee, and will be conducted in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council [NHMRC], 2023). Because the research asks young people about distressing content, it is not treated as low risk despite its non-clinical sample and online format. Four safeguards are proposed.

First, consent will be age-appropriate: participants aged 18-25 will provide standard informed consent, while those aged 16-17 will be enrolled under the mature minor provisions of the National Statement, supported by a plain-language information sheet and a comprehension check. Requiring parental consent would systematically exclude the young people whose views the study seeks to represent (NHMRC, 2023).

Second, a written distress protocol will operate throughout. Support information for Lifeline, Kids Helpline, Beyond Blue and eheadspace will appear on every page, and participants scoring in the very high range on the K10 will be shown a tailored screen encouraging contact with a general practitioner or a headspace centre, the recognised entry point to youth care in Australia (headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation, 2023). A registered psychologist will be available during data collection, and any disclosure of risk of harm will trigger a documented escalation procedure.

Third, the study will avoid framing climate concern as pathology, describing worry about climate change as an understandable response to documented environmental change (Bureau of Meteorology & CSIRO, 2024); no individual will receive a diagnostic label, as the instruments are research rather than diagnostic tools.

Fourth, a remunerated youth advisory group of eight members aged 16-25 will review participant-facing materials, the distress protocol and the interpretation of findings. Data will be stored de-identified on encrypted Australian servers, the re-identification key held separately for the follow-up wave, and results reported at group level so participants from small communities cannot be identified.

Project Timeline

The project is scheduled over twelve months, as set out in Table 2. Ethics approval is treated as a gate on all data collection, and the follow-up wave is timed so that each participant is re-contacted six months after individual completion of Wave 1.

Table 2: Twelve-month project timeline by phase, activity and week

Significance

The study offers three contributions. Empirically, it will produce the first Australian estimate of climate anxiety among 16-25 year olds stratified by disaster exposure and remoteness, usable by service planners deciding where youth mental health capacity should be strengthened. Theoretically, it extends the transactional model from individual stressors into the environmental domain and clarifies inconsistent findings on climate emotion and behaviour (Ogunbode et al., 2022; Stanley et al., 2021). Practically, if adaptive coping is confirmed as a buffer, coping-focused content becomes a defensible addition to school wellbeing curricula and to the digital resources of Australian youth mental health services, a response that neither dismisses young people’s concern nor treats it as illness.

Limitations

Several limitations are acknowledged in advance. Quota sampling through online channels will not produce a probability sample, so prevalence estimates should be read as indicative rather than population-representative. All measures are self-reported, including pro-environmental behaviour, which is vulnerable to social desirability bias. Two waves six months apart permit tests of change but not the modelling of longer developmental trajectories. Differential attrition is a further risk, since the most distressed participants may be least likely to return; attrition analysis comparing completers and non-completers on Wave 1 characteristics will be reported. Finally, findings from young people aged 16-25 in Australia should not be generalised to children or to countries with different exposure profiles and service systems.

Conclusion

Climate change is producing measurable psychological effects among young Australians, who already report the highest prevalence of mental disorder of any age group (ABS, 2023) and live in a country of intensifying fire and flood risk (Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, 2020). Existing evidence shows climate anxiety is widespread among young people internationally (Hickman et al., 2021) but leaves unresolved when it becomes debilitating rather than mobilising. By measuring exposure, appraisal, coping and outcomes in the same young Australians across two time points, the proposed study aims to identify a modifiable point of intervention. The intent is not to treat concern about the climate as a disorder, but to understand what helps young people carry it.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). National study of mental health and wellbeing, 2020-2022. ABS.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). Australia’s youth: Mental illness and psychological distress. AIHW.

Bryant, R. A., Gibbs, L., Gallagher, H. C., Pattison, P., Lusher, D., MacDougall, C., Harms, L., & Forbes, D. (2018). Longitudinal study of changing psychological outcomes following the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 52(6), 542-551.

Bureau of Meteorology, & CSIRO. (2024). State of the climate 2024. Commonwealth of Australia.

Carver, C. S. (1997). You want to measure coping but your protocol’s too long: Consider the Brief COPE. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 4(1), 92-100.

Clayton, S., & Karazsia, B. T. (2020). Development and validation of a measure of climate change anxiety. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 69, 101434.

headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation. (2023). National youth mental health survey. headspace.

Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., & van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863-e873.

Hogg, T. L., Stanley, S. K., O’Brien, L. V., Wilson, M. S., & Watsford, C. R. (2021). The Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale: Development and validation of a multidimensional scale. Global Environmental Change, 71, 102391.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

National Health and Medical Research Council. (2023). National statement on ethical conduct in human research. NHMRC.

Ogunbode, C. A., Doran, R., Hanss, D., Ojala, M., & Salmela-Aro, K. (2022). Climate anxiety, wellbeing and pro-environmental action: Correlates of negative emotional responses to climate change in 32 countries. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 84, 101887.

Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. (2020). Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements: Report. Commonwealth of Australia.

Stanley, S. K., Hogg, T. L., Leviston, Z., & Walker, I. (2021). From anger to action: Differential impacts of eco-anxiety, eco-depression, and eco-anger on climate action and wellbeing. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 1, 100003.