Question: Hi Viktoria, I am a person who is anxious aswell as having climate change anxiety when I was younger. I used to prepare for the end of the world and rising sea levels and wanted to buy a boat, so am very interested to hear about your research and findings on the topic aswell as what caused you to focus this?

Viktoria Mileva answered on 31 Oct 2024:

Hi Carmie,

I’m sorry for the super late reply! Totally understand where you are coming from!

I would highly recommend a book by Hannah Ritchie called ‘Not the End of the World’ as that really calmed me down and made things seem more manageable.

The reason why I’ve turned my attention to climate change anxiety is because I’m anxious about climate change and would like to do more on my end to help understand how people think about it, and why they think differently about it. So far findings generally (not mine specifically) suggest that political leanings are related to climate change beliefs – i.e. left-wingers are more likely to be pro-environment. They also suggest that younger people are more worried about the environment than older generations (which I think makes sense).

Strangely there is still a huge number of people who do not believe that climate change is even happening!

Hopefully we won’t be needing those boats as the governments and politicians/people in power will soon all come to their senses. Until that time, we can just keep emailing them, marching and being activists (like Greta), and doing everything possible to live sustainably ourselves.

If you’d like any more info just let me know! Happy to chat 🙂

Vicky