ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1507487
This article is part of the Research TopicClimate Change AnxietyView all 16 articles
Climate change anxiety in the scientific community: An exploratory study with Chilean Climate Change-related scholars
Provisionally accepted
- 1Center for Climate and Resilience Research, University of Chile, Santiago, Santiago Metropolitan Region (RM), Chile
- 2Facultad de Ciencias Sociales Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
- 3Universidad de O'Higgins, Rancagua, Chile
- 4University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
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Background: Eco-anxiety or climate change anxiety can be defined as a chronic fear ofenvironmental doom, that for some people might trigger clinical psychological issues.Although the study of this phenomenon is growing, there is not much understanding ofthe psychological consequences that studying climate change can have on scholarswho are overexposed to information that is generally full of negative projections. Thisstudy aims at exploring to what extent continued exposure to scientific informationabout climate change affects those who research it. Methods: We conducted an onlinesurvey with a sample of climate scientists from Chile (n=249), one of the mostvulnerable countries to climate change. A Spanish-translated and adapted version ofClayton & Karazsia's (2020) climate change anxiety scale was used along with singleitems to assess self-reported climate change anxiety, and sociodemographic factors.Results: Most Chilean climate change scientists are being emotionally affected byclimate change. However, high levels of self-reported ecoanxiety contrast with moremoderate results when measuring ecoanxiety as a whole and in both subscales,cognitive-emotional and functional. Women, young people, and those who do not havechildren, express more emotional and functional impacts. Social scientists showedhigher climate change anxiety levels than natural scientists. Conclusions: Although formost participants climate change anxiety is not affecting life functioning, this does notnecessarily mean that it will not affect them in the future. We believe that researchcentres and teams must develop strategies to help scholars cope with thepsychological consequences of working on climate change.
Keywords: Climate anxiety, Ecoanxiety, Climate Change, Chile, Mental Health
Received: 07 Oct 2024; Accepted: 30 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sapiains, Azocar, Paloml-Vélez and Rondanelli. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rodolfo Sapiains, Center for Climate and Resilience Research, University of Chile, Santiago, 3659, Santiago Metropolitan Region (RM), Chile
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