climate despair

English

Etymology

Blend of climate change +‎ despair.

Noun

climate despair (uncountable)

1. Depression caused by fear of climate change.

   Synonym: climate grief

   Hypernym: ecological grief

   • 2015 March 24, Jonathan Mingle, quoting Durwood Zaelke, Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World, St. Martin's Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 256:

     A lot of people think we don't know how to solve climate change. So we could go from climate denial to climate despair.

   • 2019 July 11, Mike Pearl, “'Climate Despair' Is Making People Give Up on Life”, in Vice:

     It's impossible to know how many people like Ruttan Walker have experienced climate despair as a mental health crisis, but despair is all around us: in our own momentary but intense reactions to the latest bit of climate news, in pitch-black memes and jokes about human extinction, even in works of philosophy and literature.

   • 2020 May 1, Christie Nicole Godsmark, “Inspiring climate action without inducing climate despair”, in The Lancet Planetary Health, volume 4, number 5, →DOI:

     There appears to be a fine balance for educators between safeguarding the mental health of students who might feel climate despair on the one hand, and inspiring students to take personal climate action on the other by presenting the facts of this unprecedented and existential threat to humanity.