Climate Change Anxiety and Hope Both Predict Action: A Moderation Analysis

Climate change is associated with extreme weather events that have devastating effects on communities worldwide. These events disrupt ecosystems, damage infrastructure, and influence physical and mental well-being. Urgent action is needed. Prior studies demonstrate that people are more likely to take action if they feel anxious about climate change and if they feel hopeful they can make a difference. However, we hypothesized that anxiety and hope would interact: that anxiety would only predict action when people felt hopeful. Therefore, we used path analysis to determine if hope moderates the relation between anxiety and action. In a cross-sectional design, 500 United States MTurk workers completed the Climate Change Hope Scale, Climate Change Anxiety Scale, and Climate Change Action Inventory. We found anxiety strongly predicted action, hope weakly predicted action, and being less than 30 years old weakly predicted action. However, hope did not moderate the relation between anxiety and action. Thus, people who are anxious about climate change engage in similar amounts of action regardless of their level of hope. Because anxiety and hope both had positive relations with action, future research could determine if hope and anxiety have causal impacts on action and look for ways of increasing urgency without dampening hope.