Key Takeaways

• Young people in India are increasingly aware of climate change, but that awareness is often accompanied by fear, helplessness, and emotional exhaustion.
• Climate communication today is built around urgency and catastrophe, but offers very few collective spaces for emotional processing or action.
• Current systems — especially media and education — create awareness without agency, deepening feelings of isolation and powerlessness.
• Climate education must move beyond information transfer and create spaces for emotional literacy, reflection, dialogue, and collective engagement.
• Climate anxiety is not only an individual mental health issue, but also a response to larger social, ecological, and political systems.

In 2024, while conducting a survey on the Perception of First Time Voters on Climate Education in India along with the Climate Educators Network (CEN), we at Asar’s  Climate and Education team noticed a pattern.

Among 1,600 young participants from four states, the majority were aware of the climate crisis, but their awareness wasn’t translating into a sense of agency. To the contrary, they reported feeling emotionally overwhelmed, uncertain about the future, and were unable to articulate what meaningful action might look like for their generation. Words like “hopelessness”, “helplessness”, “anxiety” and “anger” were used recurrently.

Over the next year, our findings formed the basis  of several conversations that led to the webinar Understanding Climate Anxiety: A Conversation and the launch of Everyday Feelings, Everyday Climate, an online tool to help young people reflect on, and articulate, their thoughts about climate change.

The webinar affirmed our earlier observations. Participants repeatedly spoke about feeling overwhelmed, isolated, exhausted, angry, and “stuck”.

Why are young people feeling overwhelmed by climate change?

One reason  could be how climate communication is structured. Young people today  consume climate news and content almost continuously — from heatwaves to floods, cyclones, drought, crop losses, deteriorating air quality indices and the doom-and-gloom of social media posts predicting ecological collapse.

Climate communication has been  built around urgency, catastrophe, and alarm. While this has succeeded in making the issue visible and immediate, it has also exacerbated people’s emotional burdens.  

The gap between awareness and agency
Current communications systems, especially education and media, are designed to deliver information and drive viewership, not elicit action. Climate change is often taught as data, policy, or science, while the press peddles catastrophe.

There are very few collective spaces where young people can process their feelings and engage meaningfully with the fundamentals of the issue

 As a result, their emotions tend to become individualised. Anxiety becomes “your stress”. Hopelessness becomes “your inability to cope”. The appropriate response to the planetary crisis becomes “doing your bit”. Reduce waste, change consumption, recycle more; but the crisis feels larger than what any one person can meaningfully influence. Without spaces for collective reflection, solidarity, or action, awareness can constrain rather than liberate.

Climate anxiety is not only an individual problem

This reflects a larger issue in modern approaches to mental health, which run the risk of hyper-individualising human suffering, framing distress primarily as something located within a person rather than something which is shaped by systems.

Treating climate anxiety only as a personal mental health issue risks obscuring the systems producing that distress in the first place. These systems include unequal urban infrastructure, insecure livelihoods, extractive development models, weak public health systems, and climate policies that often exclude young people from decision-making.

However, this does not mean that personalised care is not important. In fact, one of the strongest threads that emerged during the webinar — especially from the mental health practitioners — was the importance of self-compassion. Participants were encouraged to be gentler with themselves in the face of grief, helplessness, and overwhelm.

The webinar also taught us that many people are longing for a sense of community. 

This is where we envision climate education playing an important role; in creating room for emotional literacy, reflection, dialogue, and collective engagement.

Importantly, this is not just about turning “negative emotions” into “positive emotions”, or forcing optimism in the face of the crisis. Negative emotions are not necessarily a barrier to engagement – they are important signals on how people respond to witnessing injustice, uncertainty, or loss. 

Our tool, Everyday Feelings, Everyday Climate, emerged from this thought process. The tool does not attempt to diagnose or “fix” climate anxiety, but rather creates spaces for reflection through prompts, storytelling, metaphors, music, and lived experiences. It asks young people not only what they think about climate change, but what they feel — and whether those feelings become different when recognised collectively.