Emma Lawrance

Who are you?

Hi, I'm Dr. Emma Lawrence and I lead the climate care Centre at Imperial College in London. I'm originally from Adelaide in Australia on the lands of the Ghana people, so I grew up surrounded by koalas and birds and trees, and my family still lives there, and I have two gorgeous little nephews.

What is your background?

I have a bit of a winding background, so I studied chemistry and physics in my undergraduate, and then I studied science communication. I got to travel around Australia in a science circus and spend time in rural and remote and indigenous communities, which was a really brilliant time of life. And then after various other work and activities, I came to the UK about 12 years ago to study neuroscience. So I did my master's and then my PhD in neuroscience. And now I work in climate change and mental health. And I came to this nexus from really bringing together a lot of different interests into one. So I had quite severe mental illness when I was a teenager and into my early twenties. And it's one of the reasons that I studied neuroscience was to try and understand more about how our brains work, but also why they don't work sometimes in the way that we would really like them to. And as part of those studies, I was looking at understanding how we make decisions when we're missing information, how we deal with uncertainty of different types, and how that interacts with anxiety and the tendency to experience anxiety. And we found, for instance, that when you have a higher tendency to experience anxiety, it's harder to make those decisions under uncertainty. You're more likely to avoid the missing information. And so I bought that into my thinking. But alongside that, I had a longstanding love of nature. I was very lucky, as I just said earlier, to grow up with a wealth of biodiversity of trees, of animals on my doorstep. And it's really instilled a very deep knowledge and awareness that we're a part of nature, not apart from nature and learning about climate change. When I was studying physics and chemistry, I did a bit of climate activism when I was back in Australia. And so I was very aware of what was happening, of the challenges that our climate is facing and the huge risks that we're taking for people around the world. People are already facing if there's not enough action. And so I was working in mental health research, working with young people. I also founded a youth mental health charity, was doing a lot of work in mental health and was really struck that in all of those discussions around youth mental health, people were talking about things like exam pressure and social media, which are obviously really big issues to discuss and understand how that's affecting young people. But what I felt was really missing from the conversation was this sense of the future and of the impacts of a changing world On young people and both their current situation, but also their sense of their future and that uncertainty and how that would all come together. So I started looking into that and realised quite quickly that there are many, many different ways and deep into connections between the health of our minds and the health of our climate and environment. So now I lead the climate care centre and we get to do research, but also work in policy, work in intervention design, work in education with people around the world. So yeah, I'm super lucky that my winding life path has brought me here.

What is climate anxiety, and how is it different from general anxiety?

So the ways that climate anxiety affect people and what it is, is something that researchers are still trying to understand. And partly that's because it's so rapidly evolving, this experience of living through a rapidly changing climate and the different ways that we're responding to that as people. And so the term climate anxiety, it can mean things like people have used terms like a fear of environmental doom, an anxiety that's directed towards both current and future climate change. But beyond anxiety, people can use it to mean a whole range of sometimes really challenging emotions and thoughts. So things like anger, guilt, fear, dread, but also things like really worrying, really ruminating, thinking over and over about what the future might look like or thinking about what you should be doing about it right now. And so all of those things might fall under a term climate anxiety. For some people, it's something that they might use, that it is something that they think about, but it doesn't affect their day-to-day life. For other people, it might become something that's affecting their sleep, their ability to concentrate or work, and their general function. And so when we talk about the difference between that and something like general anxiety, general anxiety can relate to climate anxiety in some ways. So it seems like if you are someone who has a tendency to be anxious in general, you might be a bit more likely to also experience climate anxiety. But with general anxiety, often that anxiety is focused on things that you might know or might be told aren't completely rational, for instance, that they might be very unlikely to actually happen. Whereas a lot of the time with climate anxiety, people are worrying and response to what might be the scientific facts or the real experiences that they're being presented with. And sometimes with climate anxiety, it's also not impairing people's daily life and function in the way that generalised anxiety to be diagnosed with something like a generalised anxiety disorder has to be impairing your life in some way. But these experiences are very multifaceted and will look different for different people.

Who tends to experience climate anxiety, and are some groups more vulnerable than others?

Is climate anxiety considered a diagnosable mental health condition?