How common is severe climate change anxiety in Canada? Study offers a glimpse

David Toro was taken aback by the turnout at a climate change anxiety peer-support group.

After all, his feelings of dread and powerlessness when he thought about climate change could be isolating. There were like-minded people in his environmental studies program at Concordia University who shared his concerns, but he at times struggled with how to process those emotions.

Initially sparked by documentaries he saw during his childhood in Colombia, those emotions persisted as he watched the evidence on climate change mount and ecosystems careen toward – and even pass – critical tipping points, from coral reefs dying off to the Amazon rainforest drying up. He’d wonder: did other people care?

So, in late 2023 at Concordia, when Toro walked into that peer-support group meeting, he was surprised. People were pulling up extra chairs to make room for the roughly 20 people piling into the room.

“Finding this group has really helped me because it’s given me a community and outlet to handle these emotions and process them with other people who are feeling similar feelings without disengaging and without disconnecting,” he said.

Estimates of how widespread climate change anxiety feelings are in Canada have been hard to come by, but several new studies are helping to shed light on the issue.

A national survey published Tuesday estimates about 2.3 per cent of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety. Applied across the population, that translates to more than 700,000 people.

It’s believed to be the first population-representative, random-sample survey of severe climate change anxiety in Canada.

The survey found that climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes.

Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent, said the study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health.

That number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous worldviews, the authors said.

Using the same survey data, the researchers published results in July showing most young people aged 13 to 34 felt at least mild levels of worry (95 per cent) and hopelessness (88 per cent) about climate change.

A separate peer-reviewed survey, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.

“I think we need to keep monitoring and understanding what that feels like for young people because they’re coming into it from a unique perspective,” said co-author of last month’s study, Gina Martin, an associate professor at Athabasca University and adjunct professor at Western University.

“This generation of young people is the first generation that’s living completely under the shadow of climate change.”

Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, whether it be worsening air quality from more intense wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.

Yet, the mental health impacts of climate change may be underestimated in Canada, a 2022 report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada said. That could leave public health understaffed and unprepared to handle the issue, the report said.

Feeling a bit anxious or worried about climate change is a normal, and possibly even healthy response to the scale of the crisis, says co-author of Tuesday’s study Sherilee Harper, an expert in climate change in mental health at the University of Alberta. Yet, for some people, those feelings can become more severe or persistent, disrupting their daily life and mirroring symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, such as obsessive thinking, dread, the inability to concentrate and nightmares.

To find out how prevalent that severe climate anxiety is in Canada, Harper and the team behind Tuesday’s study surveyed 2,476 people from across the country. Respondents were asked a series of questions adapted from a climate anxiety scale widely used among other academics studying the issue. Those questions included how often thoughts of climate change may disrupt the person’s sleep or concentration, how often they question why they react the way they do to climate change and how often their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life.

A person’s symptoms were said to be clinically meaningful if, on average, their anxiety-related thoughts or feelings about climate change disrupted their routine and daily life at least sometimes, rather than rarely or never.

While 2.3 per cent of respondents had that more severe manifestation of climate anxiety, about 15 per cent reported at least one symptom, says the study co-authored by researchers at the University of Alberta and Acadia University.

Climate change anxiety appeared to be less common in Canada than in some other countries, the authors said, while also underlining several challenges with comparing studies. Other studies found the prevalence to be about 9.4 per cent in Australia, 3.6 per cent in the United Kingdom and 11.6 per cent among French-speaking European and African nations, the authors said.

One of the challenges in comparing the studies gets at a deeper question: at what point do concerns about climate change tip into something that could be described as climate change anxiety?

The authors noted recent research in Australia suggests the cut point commonly used on the climate change anxiety scale employed in Tuesday’s study might too high, with “clinical distress” taking place at lower levels than previously thought. The study may be underestimating the prevalence and severity of clinically relevant climate change anxiety in Canada, the authors wrote.

The results, says Harper, suggest there is a greater need in Canada for programs that integrate mental health and climate change adaptation. Supports should be increased for people who have been impacted by “climate disasters” such as wildfires or extreme heat waves, she said. It also means investing resources where they’re needed most, such as Indigenous and northern communities where climate anxiety is most common.

Meanwhile, the authors of the teen mental health study took a different approach. The survey asked more than 800 Canadians between ages 13 and 18 whether they thought climate change is impacting their mental health. Of those who said yes, about a quarter said their mental health was impacted “a lot,” and the others reported “a little.”

The teens, whose responses were anonymous, could then answer an open-ended question describing those impacts. Some talked about feeling uncertain about the future and their concerns about becoming parents as environmental conditions worsen. Others talked about how they felt anxious when they thought about wildfire season or saddened by the inaction of people with influence.

An 18-year-old girl from New Brunswick is quoted as saying it made her sad to know that “big corporations that produce loads of carbon dioxide would rather have a lot of money than a healthy planet.”

Researchers have underlined how community spaces that foster a sense of emotional resilience have been shown to be beneficial for people feeling anxious about climate change. It’s something David Toro has seen firsthand.

Toro has since graduated from Concordia, and in a way, so too has his eco-anxiety group. The facilitators, noticing how many participants were starting to attend from outside the university population, have refashioned themselves as a community group and are working to register as a non-profit called Climate Hearth, he said.

The peer support sessions are broadly structured around the rest, recovery and resistance framework designed by youth climate organizers with the non-profit Shake Up the Establishment, Toro said. The idea is to bring rest and recovery into people’s activism to ensure they don’t burn out and disengage.

After attending as a participant for more than a year, Toro is now co-facilitating their new French language support group. The group’s offerings have also expanded to include multi-way workshops.

“It’s reinforced the idea that there’s an appetite for this,” he said.

“It reminds me that not only are we not alone but there’s a need, I think, on our society to deal with these kinds of feelings and do something more productive with them.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2025.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press