How to Teach Using Research on Climate Emotions and Youth Learning

What Is The Issue?

Authors:

Kelsie Fowler & Deb L. Morrison | APRIL 2026

Things To Consider

• The complexity of climate emotions of youth, coupled with the desire to mitigate harm for learners who are already overburdened, often dissuades educators from teaching about challenging topics altogether. However, not teaching about climate change magnifies youth anxiety, depression, anger, fear, and apathy and triggers feelings of betrayal and abandonment, and even powerlessness.
• A majority of youth are concerned about climate change. By eight years old, almost all children have voiced some climate change anxiety, and older youth are making choices around higher education, careers, having a family, and maintaining long-term relationships based on their eco-emotions.
• People experience multiple eco-emotions at once—and in no particular order. These emotional responses take many forms and are influenced by a person’s own identity, community, cultural background, and experiences. Youth can sometimes toggle intentionally between very different, sometimes seemingly opposite, emotions to cope with challenging feelings, develop emotional self-regulation, and more clearly communicate their experiences and thinking.
• Social media, which often jump from one climate emergency to the next across a global scale and use sensationalized imagery, can intensify challenging climate emotions. However, some digital spaces can cultivate youths’ critical hope, solidarity, and awareness.
• Lasting anger and overwhelm can foster apathy, but it is vital to recognize that anger can also mobilize action.

Attending to Equity

Talking about climate emotions is an important coping and processing mechanism. Educator silence about climate realities and emotions fosters inequity by shielding a select few from the effects of the climate crisis through the erasure and denial of others’ unjust experiences.

Language can unite or divide, either guiding us toward, or further away from, liberation, as such it is important to be knowledgeable and explicit about particular language to help ensure shared meaning and better care. For example:

• “Climate-anxiety” is often related to neo-liberal narratives situated in predominantly white, middle-class realities because some have been shielded from climate catastrophes and invisiblize experiences of people on the frontlines.
• “Resilience” is often seen as an individual trait, but should focus on current and historic drivers of collective resilience.
• “Hope” is a complex term with a history of fragility, false optimism & fostering of unjust outcomes for those in frontline communities. Hope can be “overrated.”

Recommended Actions You Can Take

• Become familiar with climate emotion research and recommended actions. For example, developing coping and co-regulation skills early and often will help navigate climate amplified emotions—including talking about emotions, engaging in collective action, and learning about varied worldviews.
• Explore pedagogical supports for teaching climate emotions, such as Sentipensar. This will expand understandings of how feeling and thinking are interconnected and play an important role in climate sensemaking.
• Stop avoiding or dismissing youth’s demands to learn about socio-political and ecologically consequential topics; this can do significant emotional damage, including cultivating feelings of betrayal and dismissal. Instead, explore new ways to appropriately incorporate such learning into your curricular and local contexts.
• Taking a collective and systemic focus to learning about climate change and working through climate emotions, instead of centering highly individualized approaches, will improve engagement and foster climate empowerment.

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

• #107 Sentipensar Pedagogy
• #80 Reframing Eco-Anxiety
• #84 Let’s Talk Climate!