Abstract

Anxiety about climate change is becoming more and more recognized as a mental health effect of climate change. It is not only observed in populations that are most affected by climate change’s direct effects, but it can also be triggered by the mere thought and perception of those effects. Despite the fact that climate change is a global issue that has people all over the world worried about it, research on climate anxiety has only recently used validated measures, and the majority of it has been done in Western and developed societies. We used the Climate Change Anxiety Scale in a  cross-national study of climate change anxiety with participants (N = 4,000) from four of the world’s top emitters-China,India, Japan, and the United States-whose climate change vulnerabilities and resilience vary. We demonstrated that the widely used measure of anxiety about climate change was configure and metrically consistent across the four nations.