Climate Change Anxiety among Final-Year University Students

Abstract

Climate change represents a topic of interest across several disciplines, due to its importance to individuals, groups, and societies. This is due to its devastating and dangerous effects on the future of humanity, threatening a livable environment and diminishing the resources necessary for life. This raises concerns on several levels: official, scientific, and personal. In the field of psychology, a specialized branch called climate change psychology has emerged, focusing, among other topics, on the anxiety caused by climate change. This branch aims to understand people's motivations for its spread, its consequences, and the possibility of harnessing it to motivate them to transform it into a positive force, represented by practicing positive environmental behaviors that help mitigate the acceleration of climate change, adopt clean energy sources, and limit gas emissions and the phenomenon of global warming. The current research aims to identify the prevalence of climate change anxiety among university seniors, and whether there are differences attributed to gender and academic specialization. To achieve the research objectives, the researcher, after reviewing the literature on the subject, constructed a valid and reliable climate change anxiety measurement tool and applied it to a sample of male and female seniors from the scientific and humanities majors at Al-Qadisiyah University. After statistically analyzing the responses of the sample members, the results showed low levels of climate change anxiety among them, and the superiority of females over males, and students of scientific majors over students of scientific majors, with statistical significance in climate change anxiety. After interpreting the research results and comparing them with the results of other studies, the researcher presented some conclusions and proposed relevant recommendations and proposals.