Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps

By Yumiko Coffey, Navjot Bhullar, Joanne Durkin, S. Islam, K. Usher. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 2021

423 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Eco-anxiety is the distress caused by climate change where people are becoming anxious about their future. The present study reviewed the scholarly literature on eco-anxiety using a systematic scoping review process using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses' reporting guidelines for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [1] . The main aims were twofold: (i) to understand how eco-anxiety was operationalized in the existing literature and (ii) the key characteristics of eco-anxiety. Our review found that further research is needed to further the conceptual clarity of the term eco-anxiety. We found that most of the evidence comes from Western countries, and further research is needed in the non-Western countries. Indigenous peoples, children and young people and those connected to the natural world are most impacted by eco-anxiety and are identified as vulnerable. We recommend employing diverse methodologies to better understand their lived experiences of eco-anxiety.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4ba97947105826bb248672c52f19550db63b7c3