Hope and worry are the emotions most consistently linked to support for controversial approaches to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study. The findings add to a growing body of research about climate emotions and their relationship to climate change perceptions, behaviors, and support for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The new study is among the first to explore the emotions related to climate interventions, approaches that don’t directly reduce emissions but reverse their consequences, either by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth.
Some of these technologies are uncertain, come with risks, and are sometimes cast as offering “false hope” that distracts from the task of reducing emissions and preparing society and human infrastructure to face the consequences of climate change. But the pileup of climate disasters and the slow pace of emissions reductions are focusing more attention on climate interventions.
In the new study, researchers conducted an online survey of more than 30,000 people in 30 countries around the world. The survey queried how much people felt five emotions in relation to climate change – fear, hope, anger, sadness, and worry – marking the first time climate emotions have been investigated on such a broad geographic scale.
Survey participants were also asked about their perceptions of the risks and benefits of 10 different climate interventions and their support for these technologies. These include ecosystem-based strategies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as planting forests and adopting agricultural technologies to store more carbon in soils; high-tech strategies to remove atmospheric carbon such as directly capturing carbon dioxide from the air; and technologies reduce heating from the sun such as spraying particles into the upper atmosphere or using a giant mirror to reflect sunlight back into space.
After controlling for participants’ more general beliefs about science and technology as a solution to problems, aversion to tampering with nature, environmental identity, and beliefs about climate change, the researchers found that worry was the most commonly expressed climate emotion across all countries.
However, “emotions about climate change are complex and differ dramatically across countries,” says study team member Chad M. Baum, assistant professor of business development and technology at Aarhus University in Denmark. In general, people in wealthier countries report weaker climate emotions, Baum and his colleagues report in a paper published in the journal Risk Management.
“The largest differences emerged in terms of hopefulness about climate change,” Baum says. Of the 12 most hopeful countries, 11 were developing and emerging economies such as Kenya, India, and Indonesia. Just one country from the Global North, the United States, made the most-hopeful list.
But there were also differences within economically similar groups of countries. For example, the southern European countries of Spain, Italy, and Greece had the highest levels of anger and sadness about climate change, whereas northern European and Nordic countries expressed low levels of these emotions. “This could portend difficulties in organizing a regional strategy for dealing with climate change” via European Union structures, Baum says.
Hopefulness about climate change was the strongest predictor of a person’s support for climate interventions, the researchers found. Worry was the second-strongest predictor. People who were hopeful and/or worried about climate change were especially likely to support more novel and controversial interventions such as solar radiation management strategies and direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air.
“In contrast, being sad and/or angry was mostly only relevant for more familiar, ecosystems-based forms of carbon dioxide removal such as afforestation and soil carbon sequestration,” says Baum. “Those who were sadder were more supportive of these options, whereas those who were angrier were less supportive.”
More research is needed to understand the cultural dimensions of climate emotions. “The fact that respondents in developing economies in the global South were simultaneously hopeful and worried about climate change was surprising,” Baum says. The finding “runs counter to how, I would say, we think about these emotions in western, developed countries. As ever, this is a caution against having research focused on a minimal subset of western countries serve as a stand-in for the world more widely.”
Source: Baum C.M. et al. “A new hope or phantom menace? Exploring climate emotions and public support for climate interventions across 30 countries.” Risk Analysis 2025.
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