Reducing personal climate anxiety is key to adaptation

Personal actions to reduce climate change risk can not only reduce anxiety but also catalyse elevated perceptions of self-efficacy and hope, which in turn enable collective action on adaptation. In a recent Comment, Jeremy Fyke and Andrew Weaver argued that taking personal actions to adapt to climate change reduces climate anxiety¹. Drawing on theories from cognitive science and clinical experience, Fyke and Weaver suggest that “personal climate anxiety reduction might be the most notable ‘success story’ of these individual climate adaptation initiatives”. We concur wholeheartedly with this suggestion; in fact, we argue that the authors don’t go far enough in characterizing the benefits of personal adaptations. There is evidence that personal actions to reduce climate change not only have benefits in the negative end of the emotion spectrum but also have the potential to catalyse anxiety’s ‘good twin’ — hope. Indeed, by promoting hope, climate actions on the personal level have the potential to catalyse group-level benefits including elevated perceptions of collective self-efficacy and collective action on adaptation.