A young person’s fear about climate change may not be a problem to erase. It may be a signal that something important is being threatened—and that the person cares enough to act. The consequences of human activity on climate change are increasingly apparent.

They are causing ecological degradation and affecting human and animal health. Climate change is also increasingly affecting the daily life of people who had been largely spared from such events. But the distress is not only about damaged environments.

The failures of people in power to act appropriately contribute substantially to environmental distress, even more than awareness of the decline of natural environments. Eco-anxiety refers to the emotional, cognitive and physical changes an individual experiences when realizing the impacts of human action on the climate and the environment.

It can also encompass how the climate crisis intersects with social inequality and global injustice. It can involve anger, sadness, guilt, hopelessness and despair, along with distressing thoughts about realistic negative futures and a feeling of urgency to act.

Here is the paper’s central shift: when considering wellbeing, resilience and adjustment, research on eco-anxiety would gain from drawing more explicitly on work about what helps people function well. Self-determined motivation matters because it is an essential condition for young people’s wellbeing, and acting autonomously has been linked to optimal psychosocial adaptation.

For young people, acting from their own values and choices has previously been linked to better adjustment. Radical hope requires considering new and possibly radical conceptions of the future. It acknowledges the severity of overwhelming, uncertain and potentially catastrophic climate impacts.

Radical hope embraces uncertainty: although one cannot know where one’s actions will lead, one remains committed to working towards a more sustainable and just world aligned with one’s values. This kind of hope can also involve significant adults taking a validating and empathic posture toward children.

One example is a school approach that promotes critical thinking, caring, creative reasoning and inquiry, helping children make meaning. Although it was not initially developed to affect children’s mental health, it has been shown to improve children’s mental health. By fostering greater resilience and motivation that comes from within, it could also promote greater engagement with the climate crisis and perhaps reduce distressing levels of eco-anxiety for some children.

The paper’s purpose was to explain how work on wellbeing can inform research on eco-anxiety and youth. Ideas about motivation, awe and hope can support interventions that explore eco-anxiety, foster hope and encourage civic engagement. Interventions using discussion in schools and the arts show promise.

Eco-anxiety is not pathological; the point is not to make it go away but to make sure it is not destructive in children. Any cure for eco-anxiety in children lies in changing our cultural approach to caring for the planet, not in young people themselves. Supporting children with this distress is an opportunity to reimagine what supportive emotional and environmental education should entail.

That includes seeing our values and learning how to respond to difficult emotions, rather than trying to avoid them or make them go away. It also means adults hearing and heeding young people, not dismissing or ignoring them.

Supporting young people in developing motivation from within can foster wellbeing and help them be heard by those in power. The paper argues that support should help young people understand and use eco-anxiety, not simply suppress it. That means listening to them, making room for difficult feelings, and changing how adults care for the planet.