For every budding activist stirred to action there are countless other individuals overwhelmed by despair. Recently this played out in the wake of the IPCC report. In the days after the data was made public, we were bombarded with terrifying predictions for how the future would look. On the surface that spike in collective anxiety could be viewed as a twisted form of success. It highlighted how people around the world are listening to the science and talking about topics like carbon emissions in their own communities. But on closer inspection, the fear-focused reporting had an unintended impact. Rather than calling on each other to organise and act, the broad public response was heartbreak and, chillingly, resignation.  

While the IPCC report dominated public and private conversation for a few days, the rush of attention largely failed to sustain a noticeable shift in broader plans or changes. As journalist Liza Featherstone observed, “the chatter around the IPCC report and the report itself still managed to be unhelpful, scaring us to death while missing an opportunity to galvanize us into action.”   

Alaina Wood witnessed that emotional fallout in real time. Better known as @thegarbagequeen on TikTok, she is a sustainability scientist and “climate communicator” who has amassed a huge following (many of whom are very young) for her accessible, solutions-focused, decidedly not terrifying environmental content. She commented to RIISE that after the report, and its accompanying wave of terrifying media coverage, “the fear just got played up to an exponential degree on social media…People were messaging me having mental health problems, saying, ‘Hey, do we really only have 20 years left? I'm depressed.’”  Fighting climate apathy    

In her excellent newsletter Heated, climate writer Emily Atkin recently wrote, “The most harmful lie being spread about climate change today is not that it is fake. It’s that nothing you can do can help save the world.”   

She was reflecting a growing opinion in climate communications: that the greatest challenge to this work is no longer climate deniers – it’s disconnection. Something fear has a tricky way of ensuring.   

Again, Wood witnessed this play out in her DMs. “People were like, ‘Well, it’s too late. It’s all bad. Why am I an activist? It’s not worth my time.’” Even though she could hardly be accused of being an alarmist, the intense reaction led Wood to re-evaluate her own relationship to fear. “I wasn’t necessarily spreading climate doom or a lot of fear-based information. But I realised that in addition to the realism of the climate crisis, the fact that it is an emergency, we still need to hear about the positives. Because if people never hear about the positives, they don’t want to get involved.”   

Fourteen-year-old Austin Caetano has been on both sides of this experience: as a young person dealing with this barrage of bad news, but also as a climate organiser and member of School Strike 4 Climate. In that role he’s constantly looking to combat apathy and burnout in future generations. “We’re all scared; we are terrified of what can happen,” he admits. “I definitely think the scary thing does work in some way. I mean it got me into [climate activism].” But like others, he stresses that fear is not a solution on its own.