Examining Content Representation and Convergence of Climate Anxiety Measures

There is a proliferation of definitions and scales that assess climate anxiety and neighbouring constructs, but it is unclear how distinct these are in practice. We used a mixed-methods approach to examine overlaps across existing scales. We first examined how six current scales of climate anxiety represent the symptoms associated with domain-free diagnoses of anxiety, depression, and stress disorders compared to the gold-standard scales in the mental health literature. We then analysed the relationships among the climate anxiety scales using correlations and exploratory factor analysis with samples of university students (n = 143) and the general public (n = 305). Climate-related anxiety scales cover most of the symptoms associated with clinical disorders but have a higher proportion of items focusing on anxious and depressed mood, and fewer items assessing somatic symptoms compared to domain-free scales. The scales showed strong intercorrelations and loaded onto a single common factor, suggesting convergence in how climate-related anxiety has been measured in the field. Future studies could include multiple climate anxiety scales that may differ conceptually and methodologically from one another to ensure wider content representation while minimising overlap and focus on testing incremental validity to achieve a parsimonious and gold-standard measure.