In recent years, the discourse around climate change has increasingly acknowledged not only the environmental and economic dimensions of the crisis but also the emotional and psychological implications it holds for individuals and societies. The climate crisis has ceased to be a purely scientific or economic issue—it has also become an emotional and existential one. In fact, since 2016, there has been a sharp rise in the number of local and national governments declaring a “climate emergency,” with over 2,366 declarations now in place, including those from 18 countries. At the same time, scientists have issued repeated warnings using terms such as climate emergency, ecological emergency, nature emergency, and planetary or biospheric emergency to emphasize the severe threats that climate change and biodiversity loss pose to humanity and life on Earth.
While environmental discourse often emphasizes facts, data, and policy solutions, it is people’s emotional responses that ultimately motivate behavior and shape political will.
As ecological degradation accelerates, people are not only responding with cognitive concern but also with visceral emotional reactions: grief for disappearing biodiversity, anxiety about the future, anger at perceived inaction, and even numbness in the face of overwhelming complexity. This emotional landscape plays a critical but often underestimated role in shaping how societies respond to environmental challenges. Emotions influence how people perceive risks, assign responsibility, and decide to act or not act. While environmental discourse often emphasizes facts, data, and policy solutions, it is people’s emotional responses—such as fear, guilt, anger, hope, and grief—that ultimately motivate behavior and shape political will.
The Political Nature of Emotions
One of the most important shifts in recent scholarship is the recognition that emotions are not apolitical or irrational. Rather, they are deeply embedded in political structures and narratives. Emotional responses to environmental problems are shaped by political ideologies, media framings, and cultural worldviews. As such, they can function as political acts—expressions of identity, allegiance, and resistance. Consider the emotion of anger. For some, anger about environmental degradation leads to mobilization and protest. For others, anger may be directed at governmental overreach or international agreements seen as infringing on national sovereignty. This frustration often stems from a perception that unelected officials or foreign entities are making decisions that override the will of the people. As a result, individuals may feel a loss of control over their own country’s policies, fueling nationalist sentiments and public protests. The same emotion may be harnessed for radically different political projects.
Emotional responses to environmental problems are shaped by political ideologies, media framings, and cultural worldviews. As such, the same emotion may be harnessed for radically different political projects.
Similarly, fear can drive either a push for climate action or a retreat into nationalist, isolationist policy responses, depending on how individuals frame and interpret it. When fear is linked to environmental degradation and global catastrophe, it can motivate collective action and support for international cooperation. Conversely, when fear is channelled toward perceived threats from outsiders or economic insecurity, it can lead to protectionist measures and resistance to global climate agreements.
To understand the role of emotions in environmental politics, we must first reframe the domain of environmentalism itself. Although climate change remains a defining issue, a more comprehensive conceptualization of environmentalism includes interrelated themes such as biodiversity loss, conservation, pollution, waste, land use, and human-animal relationships. Emotional responses to these domains differ in intensity and kind. Grief over deforestation, disgust at plastic pollution, awe at natural beauty, and fear of water scarcity all emerge as site-specific emotional reactions that can influence policy preferences.
Emotions and Environmental Policy: Evidence from the UK
My recent study, co-authored with Elia Valentini and Benedict Hignell offers a vital empirical contribution to this growing body of work, studying how a broad array of emotions—from hope and fear to amusement and boredom—shape support for environmental policy in the United Kingdom. While the study is situated in a specific national context and primarily focused on climate change, its implications extend far beyond. It signals the need to treat emotional responses not as secondary or irrational, but as central mechanisms through which environmental policy is negotiated, supported, or resisted. By empirically suggesting how a range of emotional states influence policy support, the study disrupts the long-standing assumption that environmental decision-making is primarily rational or technical.
Considering that public opinion plays a critical role in shaping which policies are feasible and effective, this study centers on the individual level of analysis. Citizens may vary in their support for environmental policies due to competing societal concerns, such as prioritizing social welfare or security policy. Understanding how emotions about climate change influence policy support is essential for both policymakers and environmental advocates for three key reasons.
First, emotions can drive or shift motivation, affecting environmentally relevant behaviors. Research has shown that moral emotions like guilt—particularly when linked to human-caused environmental harm—can lead to stronger pro-environmental attitudes. Second, emotions shape how individuals perceive risk. Accurately addressing public risk perceptions allows policymakers to craft more effective communication, build trust, and improve policy implementation. For example, when people view environmental threats like climate change or air pollution as immediate and serious, they are more inclined to support and adhere to related policies. However, if these risks are perceived as remote or minimal, resistance to policy measures is more likely. This underscores the idea that people often rely on emotional instincts rather than deliberate reasoning when making decisions. Third, recognizing the political utility of emotion has profound implications for environmental communication and policy design. Traditionally, policymakers have relied on appeals to reason—scientific evidence, economic models, and technological feasibility. But evidence increasingly suggests that such appeals often fail to persuade or mobilize the public. Instead, emotional engagement is a more powerful predictor of action.
The study defines emotion as a psychophysiological state involving changes in cognition, experience, arousal, and behavior triggered by the appraisal of significant information. Emotional responses to climate change—shaped by cognitive thinking and epistemic beliefs—play a complex role in influencing public support for environmental policies. Due to a lack of consensus on a definitive list of environmentally relevant emotions, we employed a broad selection of context-specific emotions to examine how their intensity affects support for climate and ecological emergency (CEE) policies in the UK. While prior research has focused on both discrete (e.g., anger, fear, guilt) and grouped emotions (e.g., positive vs. negative), this study revisits those and also explores the impact of more nuanced and under-researched emotions, such as confidence. These complex emotions, although less studied, frequently appear in public opinion surveys and may significantly shape policy preferences.
The study suggests that even complex and less-explored emotions are essential for understanding how individuals perceive and respond to environmental policies, as these emotions shape their engagement with and interpretation of climate and ecological challenges. This approach enabled us to assess the significance of unconventional emotions alongside those traditionally expected to influence policy support. Additionally, emotional complexity may arise from interactions between different emotions, which can occur due to their overlapping meanings or simultaneous presence in particular contexts. Meanwhile, support for climate policies serves as a measure of the public’s readiness to back climate action, as it reveals shared attitudes and a collective commitment to tackling climate change through broad, systemic approaches. Two online surveys were conducted in 2021 and 2022 with a total of around 660 UK residents, assessing emotional reactions to three specific climate policies presented in Parliament: the Conservatives’ “ten-point plan,” the Green New Deal’s “Decarbonisation and Economic Strategy Bill,” and the Climate and Ecology Bill.
Worry, horror, and boredom consistently influence support or opposition to environmental policies.
Our work also found that worry, disappointment, and sadness about climate change were the most commonly reported emotions, while amusement, excitement, and boredom were among the least frequent emotions related to climate change. When analyzing only the emotions clearly linked to the climate and ecological emergency (CEE), worry, horror, and boredom consistently influenced support or opposition to environmental policies. In a broader model including all emotions, anxiety also emerged as a significant predictor.
Interestingly, several more ambiguous emotions—such as disappointment, confusion, hopelessness, and amusement—also played a meaningful role in shaping policy preferences, highlighting the complex emotional landscape surrounding climate change. Specifically, emotions of worry, horror, and anxiety about climate change are associated with higher support for environmental policies. Yet these emotions are themselves socially and politically constructed. They emerge within specific discourses, are amplified or suppressed by media ecosystems, and are often strategically mobilized by actors across the political spectrum.
At the same time, emotions like boredom and amusement are negatively correlated with policy support. This points to a critical challenge: how to make environmental issues resonate emotionally with individuals who feel detached or desensitized. Narrative storytelling, experiential learning, and art-based interventions may all play a role in reanimating emotional engagement. Findings reinforce the trend that negative emotions toward climate change are generally linked to stronger support for environmental action, and the study provides theoretical insights into how various emotions influence public attitudes toward policy.
Emotional Literacy and Ideology in Environmental Policymaking
These insights should not be misunderstood as a call for emotional manipulation or fearmongering. Rather, it highlights the importance of emotional literacy in environmental policymaking. Policymakers and advocates must learn to identify, engage with, and ethically respond to the emotional landscapes of their constituents. This includes not only harnessing motivating emotions like hope and concern, but also addressing disengaging ones such as hopelessness, confusion, and apathy.
Policymakers and advocates must learn to identify, engage with, and ethically respond to the emotional landscapes of their constituents.
As emotional responses become more recognized in environmental policymaking, it is crucial to consider whose emotions are being heard and legitimized. Emotional justice—the fair recognition and validation of different emotional responses—is emerging as a vital concept. Marginalized communities often experience heightened emotional burdens: grief over ancestral land loss, fear of toxic exposure, or rage over environmental injustice. Yet these emotions are frequently dismissed or pathologized in dominant policy discourse. Environmental policies must therefore attend to the uneven distribution of emotional costs and benefits. This means designing participatory processes that validate a range of emotional experiences, rather than privileging dispassionate technocratic voices. It also means challenging the assumption that emotions are obstacles to reason.
Environmental policy is not merely a domain of rational deliberation but a space of deep emotional contestation—shaped as much by affective economies as by cost-benefit analyses.
The work discussed above, though rooted in climate change, invites a wider inquiry into how discrete emotions correlate with support for diverse environmental policies. If emotions such as anxiety and disappointment predict higher support for decarbonization efforts, might similar emotional constellations drive support for wildlife protections or circular economy initiatives? These are questions future research must address. Environmental policy, in other words, is not merely a domain of rational deliberation but a space of deep emotional contestation—shaped as much by affective economies as by cost-benefit analyses.
A particularly promising direction for future research is the intersection of emotion, ideology, and environmental policy. Although my own work has touched on political controls, broader questions remain. How do emotional styles align with ideological tendencies? Are conservative environmentalists more likely to feel nostalgia or pride in nature? Do progressive activists draw more heavily on guilt, moral outrage, or hope for systemic change? Moreover, how do large-scale ideological movements—such as populism, illiberalism, and neoliberalism—shape the emotional contours of environmental discourse? For example, populist narratives often appeal to anger and betrayal, painting climate policies as elite conspiracies. Neoliberal discourses may suppress fear by promoting market-based solutions that individualize responsibility. Understanding these ideological-emotional linkages is essential for building more inclusive and effective environmental coalitions.
To effectively address the emotional dimensions of climate change, researchers can develop affective maps of specific populations (e.g., vulnerable) or regions (e.g., largely affected by climate change) in an attempt to identify prevailing emotional dispositions toward environmental issues, enabling the design of policy interventions that resonate with local emotional dynamics. Recognizing the psychological toll of ecological disruption, governments should integrate emotional resilience strategies into their climate adaptation plans, including mental health support, community-based care initiatives, and cultural programs that help communities make collective sense of ecological loss. Since emotional expression and interpretation vary across cultures, international environmental campaigns and agreements must be sensitive to these differences, avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches to emotional engagement. Moreover, environmental education should include emotional intelligence training to help individuals understand and channel their feelings about environmental change into meaningful, constructive action.
Exploring emotions and focusing on the individual is a vital step in elevating emotions as central variables in the study of environmental policy. But the implications of this insight stretch further. Emotions are not only personal reactions—they are political forces, social indicators, and strategic levers. They mediate how we perceive environmental threats, whom we trust, and what kind of futures we deem possible.
To confront the ecological crises of the 21st century, we need more than data, models, and carbon accounting. We need to understand how people feel, why they feel it, and how those feelings translate into political and policy outcomes.
To confront the ecological crises of the 21st century, we need more than data, models, and carbon accounting. We need to understand how people feel, why they feel it, and how those feelings translate into political and policy outcomes. An emotion-centered approach to environmental policy is not a departure from scientific rigor—it is an expansion of it. Only by acknowledging the full emotional, political, and relational dimensions of environmental life can we craft responses that are not only effective, but just, inclusive, and enduring.
Zorzeta Bakaki is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. She studied Political Science and Public Administration at the Law School of the University of Athens. Zeta received a Master of Science in International Relations and her PhD from the University of Essex. Previously, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ETH Zürich’s Center for Comparative and International Studies. Her research and teaching interests are international relations, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of conflict management and resolution, international cooperation, and environmental politics. Dr Bakaki’s research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, World Development, European Journal of Political Research, Environmental Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and other outlets.
Image made using “Wong-Baker scale with emoji,” by Belbury licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
