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What is Climate Anxiety an anxiety about?

Essay
Jelenko Dragisic PDF ︎︎︎

Hippocrates’ On Airs, Waters, and Places is possibly the oldest surviving text that links climate and human health. Yet outside niche circles in the health profession, few are even aware of it. The text is seen as antiquated, part of a distant past, while modern medicine dazzles us with technologies like what physicist Richard Feynman once referred to as “swallowable surgeons”: tiny devices capable of performing internal organs repairs.

Despite this technological leap, the intersection of climate and health has re-emerged, not merely as the interest of a few informed individuals, but as a field of institutional concern. While there is a long record of research papers stretching back to the mid-20th century, two key points stand out about the history of research in the area. First is the emergence of a few critical texts in the early 1990s and second is a rapid rise in scholarly publications in the past 20 years.

The two seminal texts appeared roughly 35 years ago: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 1990 and 1992 Assessments, and the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Potential Health Effects of Climate Change. The IPCC warned that health impacts would be especially severe in urban areas, a prescient observation considering that, at the time, most humans still lived in rural environments. The report also reminded us of our capacity to adapt, perhaps the most defining human trait. But, as it warned, adaptation has limits and a cost. What neither the IPCC nor the WHO could fully anticipate was the psychological toll this unfolding reality might exact, not only fear of the changes themselves, but a growing sense of isolation in the face of them.

Notably, the report made no mention of climate anxiety. Perhaps it couldn’t have. Few at the time could have foreseen that, within a generation, significant segments of society would suffer from psychological distress directly linked directly to climate change.

The WHO report was presented ‘not as an exhaustive treatise for the expert’. Its baseline projections included the suggestion that average global surface temperature could increase by 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2030, and sea level could rise by at least 0.10m by 2050. Current data suggest that, at the current rate, WHO’s predictions might have been too conservative in regard to sea level rise and overstated in the case of global temperature rise, despite the fact that both have increased. The scenario becomes even more complicated when we consider that CO2 emissions have risen by 20% in the past 30 years and if that trend persists, we can expect a further 10% increase from the current record level.

Climate anxiety is tapping into our deepest fears: isolation, exclusion and disconnection.

It also indicated that the occurrence of extreme weather events might have a more profound impact overall than average changes. The working group at the time was yet to witness the events that marked the early 21st century and established an entirely new narrative around natural disasters.

The frequency of extreme weather events increased by more than 50% in the same period. Natural disasters have affected more than half of the world’s population with no reprieve in sight. For an increasing number of people in Australia, as well as globally, natural disasters or extreme weather events have become portals into climate change, so much so that many choose to ignore scientific facts; and simply rely on what they experience firsthand. This is a vital point in how we communicate, discuss and adapt to climate change when things appear too much to metabolise and make sense of.

The evolution and maturing of our knowledge about climate change and its effects on human health was perhaps best served with the publication of Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and Human Health (1993), by late Australian epidemiologist A. J. McMichael. McMichael wrote an open letter shortly before his passing in 2014 in which he said, “In the long run, the harm to human health from climate change is more than an avoidable burden of suffering, injury, illness and premature death. It signals that our mismanagement of the world’s climate and environment is weakening the foundations of health and longevity.” That message effectively not only demands a sense of urgency to act but also hints, however unintentionally, at anxiety-induced lack of resolve.

However, things have moved on rapidly and not necessarily in a reassuring way. The body of research in the space of climate change and health has grown and expanded in various directions. We know a lot more about it now, to a point where the lack of concrete action is mildly baffling. Survey after survey shows climate anxiety is real. All too real, especially for some members of the community. The Lancet Commission on Climate Change in 2009 concluded that “climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”.

To complicate the picture further, and without going into a great deal of sifting through economic data, the cost of climate-induced health problems is genuinely frightening. Sustainability Victoria has estimated that extreme heat alone costs the Australian economy over A$8 billion per annum. Globally, some projections forecast an annual loss of US$2.4 trillion dollars by the end of this decade. The burden on the economy globally by the end of the century could be up to 4% of global GDP. As if these figures are not worrying enough, last year the World Economic Forum projected that within 25 years, climate change could result in US$12.5 trillion in economic losses. For comparison, that is more than the combined total economic output of Australia, Canada, the UK and Japan.

From those early days of expressing concern and formulating what today is a solid body of knowledge, little real-term advancement has been made in practice. As a group of experts pointed out in The Lancet (perhaps the most influential peer reviewed medical journal) a few years ago (in the midst of COVID), “To date, there are few examples of implementation science studies that help guide climate-related health adaptation.” The authors warn in their Advancing Climate Change Health Adaptation Through Implementation Science paper, that “As the urgency of the climate crisis escalates, with increasing morbidity and mortality from climate change-fuelled extreme weather and climate events, proactive and effective interventions to protect public health against the risks of a changing climate are crucial.”

Climate anxiety is a term used synonymously with solastalgia or climate distress to describe all of the emotions and experiences that come with increased awareness of the effects of climate change

The warning might serve as a subtle or perhaps naïve question: what is climate anxiety an anxiety about? Could there be something that makes people anxious in a way that also interferes with their ability to spring to action? The evidence is clear. The threat is real. So why so little action? Why no decisive action in sight? To be fair, we know that important work has been done by many governments in the form of releasing strategies for health and climate change. Here in Australia, the first such strategy was released just over a year ago. A promising start. And worthy of note given that the majority of countries have not made that step as at present. Yet, as is widely recognised, strategies, by themselves, are just that. At the risk of virtue signalling, strategy implementation demands major resourcing, education, programme implementation and, last but not least, a cultural paradigm shift. Given how complex climate change is and how its impact makes human health more vulnerable, it pays to consider how we narrate that space.

For instance, the term ‘climate anxiety’ is not mentioned in the strategy implementation plan. That omission isn’t necessarily a flaw. But it does raise a pressing question: if climate anxiety, or as many experts call it, ‘climate change anxiety’ (CCA), is now widely used in daily discourse, particularly among younger populations, will such a strategy be inclusive and capable of genuine engagement? This is not a petty question. It is a pragmatic one, given how difficult it is to mitigate the mental health side of climate and health.

Given all that, it might be helpful to consider that anxiety is a form of response to fear - two closely related but critically different phenomena. One is a response to the other, so to speak. We fear things when we know the object of fear and feel anxiety when that object is obscure. Clearly there is a lot more to this, but it is a helpful way to frame some very critical questions in regards to the way people make sense of anxieties that arise from climate change-related events.

The picture of climate anxiety becomes further blurred at the exact place where climate and psychology intersect. It threatens with a fast evolving and at times incredibly simplistic narrative that leaves historical, sociological and philosophical context completely out of the frame. It leads to less not more quality discussion. It simplifies the answers to complex problems. Recklessly so even. Climate and anxiety are perhaps most prolifically found amongst young people. While not exclusive to that segment of society, it certainly has gained more traction than elsewhere. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt dubbed Gen Z ‘the anxious generation’. This is also the generation that has voiced its concerns about a climate impacted future in an emblematic way, using the ubiquitous power of social media. The response has not led to a meaningful grasp of deeper underlying processes that affect not only one generation. This invariably has paved a way for ‘solutions’ that appeal on some level but come irresponsibly close to pop psychology and self-help informed ideas about anxiety.

The way climate anxiety could be forming in society is through things we recognise; extreme weather events being perhaps the most obvious example. Most people are not inclined to read lengthy IPCC reports. But when, as noted by the recently concluded Senate Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Resilience, 70% of Australians were living in a local government area (LGA) impacted by a disaster event, with half of LGAs in a disaster-declared zone, it becomes apparent that natural disasters are immediate and logical prompts for people to think about climate change. While we know that not all people will automatically conclude that natural disasters are a direct outcome of climate change, we do know that a very high percentage of people wonder about a connection. Some surveys have shown that people who have been affected by an extreme weather event are almost twice as likely to worry a great deal about climate change compared to those who have not. Furthermore, those affected by extreme weather events are far more likely to believe that climate change effects such as global warming are already happening.

Why does this matter? To begin with, we can observe how people are making sense of climate change through their lived experience of extreme weather events. This needs to be recognised and incorporated into mitigation strategies. If the community, including researchers, practitioners, and leaders, speaks in terms of climate change anxiety, then policy must respond in kind. It’s not a trivial matter; it’s a practical one. Failing to do so risks leaving people to cope in isolation. Climate anxiety, in this sense, may not just be about rising seas or searing heat, but about being left alone to face them.

In other words, climate anxiety might be tapping into our deepest fears: isolation, exclusion, and a profound sense of disconnect in the face of threats we cannot yet fully comprehend. It is worth remembering that, while anxiety can be mitigated with the assistance of psychologists and be viewed strictly from a clinical perspective, this response may fall drastically short of the actual need. Moreover, failing to grasp the fact that anxieties have complex and deep-rooted causes, including isolation in the face of threats, can easily become a failure to account for the powerful role a sense of belonging and social capital have in preventing anxiety from arising in the first place.

We can invest in training more psychologists ready to offer help to those whose climate anxiety is preventing them from living well, or we can also equally focus on helping communities to better grasp climate change. That is, help them identify the objects of fear and identify strategies for dealing with those threats.

If anxiety thrives in isolation, then the antidote is not only psychological but cultural. We must not only train more professionals, but rebuild shared meaning, helping communities to see, name, and respond to threats together. Adaptation has always been our strength, but only when we adapt with greater unity.

Climate anxiety, then, may best be understood as a signal, not just of ecological crisis, but of the need for renewed connection and meaning. What transpires from there is open to each community to explore and define.

Climate anxiety, then, may best be understood as a signal, not just of ecological crisis, but of the need for renewed connection and meaning.

Against Hidden Reductionism: Why Complexity Thinking is Not Systems Thinking

Essay
Jelenko Dragisic

There is a great deal of talk these days about systems thinking. Entire libraries are dedicated to it, workshops branded in its name, consultants selling it as the next evolution in leadership or strategy. It is, at first glance, an attractive proposition. After all, who wouldn’t want to understand the world as a system of interconnected parts, delicately balanced and constantly interacting? Yet, I can’t shake the sense that this surge of enthusiasm masks something deeper and problematic. Systems thinking, at least in how it’s widely practised and sold, feels less like an invitation to think differently and more like an old habit dressed in a new language. It is, in many cases, a form of hidden reductionism.

We need to pause and ask: what kind of thinking is truly required when dealing with complexity? Because what passes as systems thinking often stops at mapping parts and their relations—essentially a sophisticated form of disassembly and reassembly. It is a clever way of returning to familiar ground, where we believe that by breaking things down, naming the parts, understanding their function, and then piecing them back together, we will somehow master the system. It’s comforting, linear, and ultimately false. The mistake, I believe, lies in the assumption that every system can be treated the same way, regardless of its nature. Not every system is complex.

We need to pause and ask: what kind of thinking is truly required when dealing with complexity?

We need a way of thinking and diagnosing that respects the irreducibility of complex systems.

Complicated systems—machines, bureaucratic processes, static frameworks—lend themselves well to this approach. They have parts, those parts have functions, and when you tweak them, predictable outcomes follow. But when we are dealing with complex systems, something fundamentally different is at play. Complexity is not a matter of scale or number of parts. It is about how the system behaves—its adaptiveness, its capacity for emergence, its self-organisation, its resilience. A complex system is not a static object waiting to be understood by pulling it apart; it is a living, dynamic, evolving entity, irreducible to its individual components.

This is why I find the popular label “complex adaptive systems” both redundant and misleading. A system that is complex must be adaptive. Adaptivity is not an add-on; it is a defining feature. You cannot describe a complex system without acknowledging its capacity to evolve, respond, reorganise, and surprise. To separate adaptivity out as if it were some optional feature suggests a lack of grasp of what complexity actually entails.

The deeper issue, however, is not merely a matter of terminology. It is about the way we habitually think. Our default mode of understanding is analytical—we carve out the world into pieces, categorise them, attempt to grasp the relationship between those pieces, and assume that by assembling this knowledge, the whole will reveal itself. We approach systems, phenomena, even people, as puzzles to be solved by way of dissection. It’s the same whether we are analysing an organisation, an ecosystem, or an individual human being. We disassemble and then hope to reconstruct.

But what if that very instinct is the obstacle? Complexity thinking, as I see it, demands something far more radical. It requires that we resist, consciously and continually, this urge to break things down into discrete, manageable parts. Because in complex systems, the “parts” are not truly parts. They are not independent units with fixed boundaries. Instead, they are better understood as dimensions, as particular lenses or prisms through which the whole system can be glimpsed.

Take, for example, the usual list of attributes associated with complex systems—emergence, resilience, self-organisation, order, chaos, equilibrium, entropy. The common mistake is to treat these as parts that can be isolated, measured, optimised, or corrected. But they are not parts in any meaningful sense. They are dimensions—ways in which the whole system manifests itself when viewed from a particular angle. They are not separable components that can be removed, studied, and then reinserted. Rather, the whole system is always present, visible differently depending on the dimension through which we choose to observe it.

It’s like looking at a human being and thinking you can understand them by cutting off their hand or isolating their ear. Of course, you can describe the anatomy of a hand or an ear. But what you lose in the process is the recognition that the hand only makes sense as part of a living, breathing, whole person. The hand contains a trace of the whole person; it is not merely an object attached to a body. To truly understand a person through their hand, you must see the entire person in the hand—not as a separate part, but as a dimension through which the person reveals themselves.

Similarly, when we look at resilience or emergence in a complex system, we are not identifying a detachable component. We are seeing the whole system as it expresses itself through resilience or emergence. Each dimension reveals a different face of the system, but always the system in its entirety. It’s a shift from part-thinking to dimensional-thinking.

This is where I believe most systems thinking falls short. Despite all its language about interconnection and feedback loops, it still operates on the premise that if you understand the parts well enough, the system will surrender its secrets. It assumes that by mapping, analysing, and optimising individual elements, the whole can be controlled or predicted. But complexity is not controllable. It is not something that can be reverse-engineered like a machine.

What is needed instead is a way of thinking—and a way of diagnosing—that honours the irreducibility of complex systems. A diagnostic tool that resists the temptation to dissect and instead invites us to observe how the whole system shifts when viewed through different dimensions. Such a tool would not promise easy solutions or control; rather, it would offer patterns, insights, and relational understanding. It would teach us to look, not to fragment.

In a time when every field seems eager to slap the word “systems” onto their strategies, the real challenge is to avoid falling back into the same reductionist traps under a new banner. Complexity thinking is not a brand of systems thinking. It is something else entirely—a discipline of resisting the fragmentation instinct, and learning instead to engage with wholes as wholes, in all their unpredictability and aliveness.

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# CONTRIBUTORS

# CODA

What is Climate Anxiety an anxiety about?

Climate anxiety is tapping into our deepest fears: isolation, exclusion and disconnection.

Climate anxiety is a term used synonymously with solastalgia or climate distress to describe all of the emotions and experiences that come with increased awareness of the effects of climate change

Climate anxiety, then, may best be understood as a signal, not just of ecological crisis, but of the need for renewed connection and meaning.

Against Hidden Reductionism: Why Complexity Thinking is Not Systems Thinking

We need to pause and ask: what kind of thinking is truly required when dealing with complexity?

We need a way of thinking and diagnosing that respects the irreducibility of complex systems.

#

CONTRIBUTORS