Who pays for eco-anxiety?

People no longer think of climate anxiety as a strange mental health issue. It’s a social event that can be measured. A 2021 Lancet Planetary Health study in ten countries found that almost 60 per cent of young people were “very worried” about climate change. More than 45 per cent said it made their daily lives harder. Similar trends are observed in India, especially among urban youth who are subjected to elevated temperatures, air pollution, and climate-related media. But treating eco-anxiety as just a mental health issue hides a bigger question about political economics: who makes it happen, who makes it worse, and who pays for it in the end? The answers are not easy to find or morally right.

Climate risk and distribution across generations

Climate change is fundamentally intergenerational. It took over two hundred years for the emissions that are causing today’s warming to build up, mostly from industrialised economies. But its effects—too much heat, crop failure, and erosion of the coastline—will get worse as today’s kids grow up.

The burden of generations is clear in India. The India Meteorological Department has seen a steady rise in heatwave days in northern and central India over the past 20 years. Cities like Delhi and Ahmedabad have reached wet-bulb temperatures that make people much more likely to die. Young people are getting jobs in economies that are likely to have unstable weather.

This structural inheritance underlines the validity of youth concerns. However, anxiety is more than just a byproduct of climate science. It is influenced by speech, mobilisation techniques, and institutional responses.

The politics of climate alarm

Since 2018, Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future campaign have been closely linked to getting young people around the world to take action. Thunberg’s actions had a big impact on politics. She turned climate change from a policy issue into a moral one. Her speech to the UN in 2019, in which she blamed politicians for ruining her generation’s future, turned teenage anger into a story of betrayal that went viral.

Moral urgency is a good way to get people to act. It makes things clearer, makes the message more direct, and brings people from different countries together. But it also makes the space for discussion smaller. When political language focuses on the end of the world and moral failure, it can make people more stressed out without giving them enough power to change things, especially in countries where structural problems make it hard to make quick changes.

This is not an argument against activism. It is a call to look into how rhetorical intensification changes how easily people can be affected by things. Research on climate communication indicates that individuals experience a sense of helplessness upon receiving prolonged negative information, unless accompanied by practical and feasible solutions. In other words, rushing without taking charge makes you feel weak and worried.

Global North-South imbalance

Eco-anxiety has a unique developmental context in India and other developing nations. India’s per capita emissions remain significantly lower than those of most OECD countries. Hundreds of millions continue to rely on inexpensive energy access for mobility, livelihood, and welfare. Coal still accounts for the vast majority of electrical generation. A hasty, unplanned fossil fuel withdrawal could disproportionately harm energy-poor residents and workers in coal-dependent areas.

However, global climate language, which is frequently moulded in European contexts, sometimes universalises moral obligation while failing to fully recognise diverse capacity. When fossil fuel use is only seen as an ethical failure, it ignores the unfairness in international climate negotiations that comes from development. Historical emitters and emerging economies do not share identical moral or structural positions.

This tension adds to the many worries that Indian youth have: fear of environmental disaster and not knowing what the best way to develop is.

The crisis cycle, media, and algorithms

This dynamic is made worse by the digital ecosystem. Images of disasters like wildfires, ice shelves breaking apart, and villages being flooded spread faster than complicated policy talks. Algorithms for social media sites give more weight to posts that are emotionally charged. News cycles focus on the worst parts of disasters instead of how people are adapting. Young people in cities see the climate problem as a never-ending emergency that is being controlled by algorithms. Climate stress has a more direct impact on rural areas, causing things like water shortages, crop failures, and heat-related illnesses, but it is not talked about as much.

The psychological strain is different for everyone, but they all seem to agree on how unstable it is. Every day in this mediated environment, eco-anxiety is heightened. Scientific forecasting becomes socially enduring.

Policy ambiguity and institutional trust

Uncertainty over governance is another source of environmental distress. India has set a net-zero objective for 2070 and increased renewable capacity dramatically during the last decade. However, specific transition plans, particularly for coal regions and climate-vulnerable districts, remain a work in progress. Developed countries’ international climate financing commitments have consistently fallen short of their promises.

When legislation appears aspirational rather than practical, generational trust erodes. Young people are responding not simply to rising temperatures but also to perceived institutional delays. Anxiety thrives on ambiguity.

From worry to power.

Eco-anxiety shows that you care about the environment. It shows that this generation doesn’t think that environmental damage is normal. But fear can’t always be the currency of climate politics.

For climate governance to be sustainable, it needs:  

●        Plans for clear transitions between sectors.  

●        Clear climate financial flows.  

●        Only plans for employees to move on.

●        Communication strategies that stress the need for action and involvement.

●        Localised adaptation success stories that show how it works.

Greta Thunberg’s actions, which got a lot of attention, were successful in getting young people to take action. The next step is institutional consolidation, which means turning moral outrage into fairness and clarity in how things work.

The issue is not the existence of eco-anxiety. It clearly does. The main question is whether society will keep passing on the mental costs of climate change to future generations or whether climate governance will grow into a system that shifts responsibility based on past emissions and structural capacity.

The climate period could be marked by eco-anxiety as an emotional trait. It will depend on whether policymakers, markets, and movements put change ahead of symbols and who pays for it.

Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political analysis, ESG research, and energy policy

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth