**4. Eco-Anxiety in Childhood**

As awareness grows concerning the earth's perilous state, words such as "climate anxiety" also called "eco-anxiety" (Clayton et al. 2017), "solastalgia" (Albrecht 2005), "climate/environmental grief", and "psychoterratic syndromes" (Albrecht 2011) enter contemporary lexicons. Such terms seek to depict different dimensions of the impact of climate change on human mental and physical health and spiritual wellbeing. The American Psychological Association (APA) report on "Mental Health and Our Changing Climate" defines eco-anxiety as "chronic fear of environmental doom" (Clayton et al. 2017, p. 68). Within the growing body of psychological research attending to the mental health-related effects of climate change, the concept of eco-anxiety arose in response to the need to characterize the range of human emotional responses that include high levels of worry, fear, despair, sorrow, grief, depression, and existential anxiety felt in relation to ecological destruction and environmentally-related stressors (Ojala et al. 2021; Pihkala 2020a). Eco-anxiety may also include traumatic stress responses, particularly when ecological destruction is more directly experienced, as might be the case among children caught up in an extreme weather event or another climate-related disaster or those who must migrate from their homelands due to environmental factors.

I use eco-anxiety and climate anxiety as general terms to describe this range of bodily, spiritual, and psychological distress related to the effects of climate change. Eco-anxiety refers to emotions that have their origin in concern for the earth itself and for the suffering of non-human creatures. It also references feelings of anxiety generated by one's own experience of the impacts of climate change. In other words, a child might feel eco-anxiety in the form of worry over the ocean's sickness from plastic waste or worry for the Florida panther facing extinction. Another child's eco-anxiety might center more on the impact of climate change on people, such as the worry that their community will run out of fresh drinking water or that poor air quality is harmful to their friend who suffers from asthma. Still, another child, living as part of a household displaced by drought-driven famine, experiences climate anxiety as chronic, existential worry about the threat posed to their family's life and wellbeing by ecological degradation.

Eco-anxiety for children thus may include the "emotional response that can be seen even where there is no immediate physical evidence of impact of climate change on one's own life, a projected and anticipated anxiety into the future"(Hickman 2020, p. 414). The future-oriented aspects of eco-anxiety are characterized by worry, grief, and loss and sometimes by trauma, especially in situations of direct exposure to climate-related disaster events, climate migration, and displacement, in relation to which children may experience post-traumatic stress effects well beyond the event itself (Currie and Deschênes 2016; Garcia and Sheehan 2016; Gislason et al. 2021; Kousky 2016). All of this is to underscore the centrality of eco-anxiety's connection to time in the experience of children: ecological degradation brings harm in the present but is simultaneously tied to threatened harms and the after-effects of trauma extending in the future, creating uncertainty.<sup>7</sup> The future-related aspects of climate anxiety are born in part out of the stress of not knowing what takes place amid anticipation of catastrophe, alongside the long-term "chronicity" of eco-anxiety (Clayton 2020; Clayton et al. 2017).

#### **5. Children as Especially Vulnerable to Climate Harms**

Children are particularly subject to climate anxiety for a reason: climate scientists and mental health experts alike agree that children are among the most vulnerable to its negative effects (Burke et al. 2018; Clayton et al. 2017; Hickman et al. 2021; Sheffield and Landrigan 2011; Stanley et al. 2021). An overarching aspect of such vulnerability that cuts across physical, social, and mental health dimensions concerns the greater proportion of children's lives spent under the conditions of the climate crisis. That is, the young today live their entire lives under its sway. Because they have a longer life expectancy than do the adults coming before them, children risk longer exposure to "newly developing or worsening environmental hazards in the future" (Sheffield and Landrigan 2011, p. 292) in addition to the present-day impacts of such hazards.

Children also experience particular vulnerability to the effects of climate change due to their developmental status (Vergunst and Berry 2021), including their emotional capacities for dealing with stress and distress, which are still maturing. They, therefore, are more vulnerable to the effects of ongoing, chronic stress on the brain's structure, which Wu and colleagues consider a risk factor for mental illness: "As such, the stress of a climate crisis during a crucial developmental period, coupled with an increased likelihood of encountering repeated stressors related to climate change throughout life will conceivably increase the incidence of mental illness over the life course" (Wu et al. 2020, p. e435). Physically, children have "less effective heat adaptation capacity than do adults", and they experience higher exposure of air- and water-toxins per body weight in their stilldeveloping systems (Sheffield and Landrigan 2011, p. 292).

The World Health Organization (WHO) maps what they call the "global burden of disease", a measure of the percentage of the overall morbidity and mortality carried by various population groups around the world. Looking at diseases and risk factors for disease attributable to climate change two decades ago, the WHO held that more than "88% of the existing burden of disease due to climate change occurs in children < 5 years of age in both devel-

oped and developing countries" (Zhang et al. 2007 in Sheffield and Landrigan 2011, p. 292). According to the WHO, 1.7 million children under the age of five died in 2012 from environmentally-related causes, and 2021 WHO information shows that 25% of the "disease burden" in children under five can be accounted for by environmental risks.<sup>8</sup> This means children as a group bear more effects from diseases related to climate change. That is, they have higher rates of complications and death from diseases that proliferate in response to global temperature fluctuations (e.g., the increase in mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria or the zika virus that result because warmer temperatures are favorable for the insect carriers) (Burke et al. 2018, pp. 1–2), or to climate disaster-related pathogens (e.g., diseases linked to infectious agents in unclean water) (Currie and Deschênes 2016, p. 4). Nutritional deficits related to climate-related famine have a decidedly greater impact on children's developing bodies (Garcia and Sheehan 2016, p. 87).

In addition to such physical vulnerabilities, children face an array of socially-mediated effects from climate change (Gislason et al. 2021). They are more dependent upon others to mitigate climate change's difficult effects (Sheffield and Landrigan 2011, p. 291). Children experience particularly strong consequences from climate-related disruptions to family, community, education, and place because of the limited power they have to negotiate these environments independently. Such disruptions can happen through displacement/forced migration caused by extreme weather events (Kousky 2016). These adverse experiences may result from the need to flee conflicts and war that happen when land, water, and other resources become scarce as tensions are exacerbated by environmental factors (Garcia and Sheehan 2016, p. 86).

A primary climate change-related phenomenon such as a fire, for example, might result in a child's loss of their home, with the subsequent disruption to their ability to attend school. However, beyond this are many secondary and tertiary effects: the disruption in education brings with it a sudden change in social networks, including not only a child's peer group but also daily access to a significant group of professionals such as teachers, school nurses, chaplains, food services workers, and others who are suddenly removed from that child's "relational web". The destruction of the home represents a significant economic setback for the family, which may impact the child's access to food, clothing, healthcare, and other resources. If the family is already economically vulnerable, such stressors most certainly are compounded, amplified by intersectional features such as race. On top of these material and relational losses, a child in these circumstances will undoubtedly contend with emotional distress. Climate change thus has the power to create multiple points of impact in the lives of children, including its ability to amplify existing social inequalities as "climate change intensifies and complexifies vulnerability in the lives of children and youth" (Gislason et al. 2021, p. 2). In other words, for children already experiencing existential crises from other sources of trauma and suffering, such as the collective and historical traumas of racism, climate change and the anxieties it engenders only deepen the vulnerabilities already present.

At the same time that children experience vulnerabilities particular to their age, sociocultural, and geographical contexts, they are not without agency in relation to the current climate crisis (Gislason et al. 2021). It is tempting to paint children as *only* vulnerable and dependent (i.e., having no power or agency, needing others for care) and as *solely* vulnerable and dependent (i.e., the only creatures experiencing vulnerability and dependency). In reality, while children do suffer particular vulnerabilities and dependency, they are more than these elements alone and should not be reduced to them. Climate activism among children and youth is an important source of resiliency (Gislason et al. 2021, p. 9). Children mobilized for climate action comprise a leading voice in the growing acceptance of climate change and of the need for urgen<sup>t</sup> action.<sup>9</sup> And while I highlight children's contingent status, this is not to ignore the interdependent and co-vulnerable reality that is a feature of *all* creatureliness. As theologian David Clough puts it, "human beings and other animals are thought of together in Christian scripture. Together they are given life by their creator as fleshly creatures made of dust and inspired by the breath of life, together they are given

a common table in Eden and beyond, "*together they experience the fragility of mortal life, together they are the objects of God's providential care* ..." (Clough 2012, p. 40, italics mine). Children's visible vulnerability and dependency bring home the often-unwanted truth that creatureliness is a precarious state for all who share this status—namely, all but God. Eco-anxiety is but another manifestation of this existential reality.

## **6. Critics of Eco- and Climate-Anxiety**
