SPRING 2024 NO.84 / THOUGHT LEADERSHIP BRIEF 2 Against this backdrop, anxiety and worries about the existential and symbolic threats of climate change are increasingly gaining momentum in the public. These negative emotional responses are not only observable among people who are directly affected by the ill impacts of climate change such as weather extremes; they can also be triggered by the mere thought and perception about climate change among individuals who do not yet personally suffer from direct impacts. This emerging phenomenon of fear, worry, and apprehension associated with concerns about climate change is referred to as climate change anxiety or, when referring to the ecological crisis more broadly, eco-anxiety. A noticeable gap in the existing research about climate change anxiety is that findings based on populations in the Global South have been lacking. In particular, despite its huge population size and high level of vulnerability of climate change impacts, China has rarely been the focus of previous research. To fill this gap, this paper, informed by a series of recent studies from our research team, examines the phenomenon of climate change anxiety in the public in China. ASSESSMENT Prevalence of Climate Change Anxiety First of all, we tried to understand how prevalent climate change anxiety is among the Chinese public. It should be noted that climate change anxiety can be conceptualized merely as negative feelings toward climate change (i.e., feeling anxious, worried, terrified about climate change) or as symptoms of significant impairments in cognitive and emotional domains and in terms of daily functioning. We obtained data from China regarding both conceptualizations. In a study conducted in 2023 (Chan, Tam, & Clayton, 2023), with a sample of 1,009 respondents from China, nationally representative in age and gender and diverse in income and education levels, we measured respondents’ negative feelings when thinking about climate change. We observed that 36.5% of our respondents Figure 1. Distribution of Reported Frequency of Functional Impairments Associated with Climate Change Anxiety Among Chinese Respondents (Based on Tam et al., 2023) reported feeling tense somewhat, quite a lot, or extremely. Similarly, the percentage for feeling anxious was 37.8%, that for feeling worried was 47.5%, and that for feeling terrified was 31.3%. These response distributions were similar to what we observed with a sample from the United States in the same study. In a four-country study conducted in 2021 (Tam, Chan, & Clayton, 2023), we measured impairments associated with climate change anxiety among 1,000 respondents from each of the following countries: mainland China, India, Japan, and the United States; the samples were nationally representative in terms of gender and age and diverse in terms of income and education levels. With a validated measure, we observed that over 20% of our Chinese participants reported that they sometimes or more than sometimes experienced cognitive-emotional impairments (e.g., crying, difficulty to concentrate, difficult to sleep) and functional impairments (e.g., undermined ability to work, difficult to have fun with others). In addition, around 3% of the Chinese respondents reported that they often to almost always experienced such impairments (see Figure 1). This level of prevalence was found to be similar to that observed in an Indian sample, and substantially higher than those observed among Japanese and American respondents. Often to Almost Always Rarely to Less than Sometimes Never to Less than Rarely Sometimes to Less than Often 53.60% 24.50% 18.70% 3.20%
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