Getting started with climate education in the classroom reveals a few issues for teachers. Confidence in the science, political controversy and climate anxiety can all be challenges, and are not easily answered. This post explores climate anxiety in the classroom, helps you understand the different reactions in your classroom and will pull together other resources and give you some hints for what you can do.
Climate anxiety is real, it’s in our classrooms, and it’s not going away. The question isn’t whether to teach about climate change.The question is how to do it in a way that informs rather than overwhelms, that builds agency and knowledge rather than dread.
Where do we start?
Understand what you’re dealing with
Climate anxiety refers to the fear, worry, and distress that comes from awareness of the climate crisis. It’s not a necessarilly a clinical disorder, but it is a rational emotional response to a real threat.
The scale of it among young people is important to understand – as are the age groups affected. A Greenpeace UK survey (2023) found that 78% of primary-aged children said they were worried about climate change. A landmark Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across ten countries found that nearly 60% felt very or extremely worried, with many saying they felt the future was frightening and that adults were failing them.
In England, over half of child and adolescent psychiatrists report seeing young people distressed specifically about climate change. Teachers are reporting it too – rising awareness, rising anxiety, and not enough support.
For teachers, it’s important to remember that eco-anxiety isn’t a sign something has gone wrong in your classroom. It tells you that pupils care and that they’re paying attention.
The difference between informing and frightening
A commone question I get asked – how we can inform, without frightetning?
Teaching that frightens:
- Leads with worst-case scenarios without context
- Presents climate change as something that’s already failed — no solutions, no agency, no hope
- Focuses heavily on what has been lost rather than what can be done
- Uses graphic images or extreme language without preparation or follow-up
- Ends the lesson without any sense of action or forward movement
Teaching that informs:
- Is honest about the science and the seriousness, without exaggeration
- Makes space for emotional responses
- Balances the challenge with evidence of action, innovation, and change
- Gives pupils something to do
- Finishes with agency, not despair
The research is clear on this: young people need to know the truth, and they need support processing it. Just as with any challenge or trauma, they need to feel like the adults around them are taking it seriously enough to act.
Remember: If a pupil senses you’re anxious too, that’s not necessarily a problem. Modelling honest emotion alongside purposeful action is more reassuring than false confidence.
What helps: six practical approaches
1. Start with what pupils already feel, not with facts
What do pupils already know? What do they worry about? What have they seen or heard?
This doesn’t have to be a big emotional exercise, maybe it’s a sticky note activity, an anonymous worry box, or a class discussion framed as: “What do you already know about climate change, and how does it make you feel?”
This will allow you to respond to the actual anxiety in the room, not a hypothetical version of it.
2. Separate the science from the doom
The science is serious, and pupils should understand it. But there’s a difference between teaching the science of climate change and teaching that all is lost.
Think of positive news, seek it out. For example: renewable energy is the fastest-growing energy source in the world. The cost of solar has fallen by over 90% in the last decade. More countries are meeting emissions targets than ten years ago. Young people are driving policy changes that were unimaginable a generation ago.
3. Make space for difficult emotions.
When a pupil expresses distress, the instinct is sometimes to either minimise it (“don’t worry, it’ll be fine”) or to match it (“yes, it is terrifying”). Neither is particularly helpful.
What works better is validation followed by movement: “It makes sense to feel worried about this, it feels like a big thing, and it’s real. What I also want you to know is that there are things we can do, things that are already happening…”
UCL’s climate education research recommends creating supportive learning environments that validate students’ feelings, foster emotional resilience, and cultivate a sense of hope and agency.
4. Build in agency, and empower.
Research consistently shows that the antidote to climate anxiety is not reassurance but action. Pupils (and adults) who have something to do, some way to contribute, feel less helpless.
That action doesn’t have to be grand. It might be:
- Writing to the school council about reducing food waste
- A class energy audit
- A nature journal or wildlife survey of the school grounds
- A letter to a local MP
- Researching a local climate initiative and presenting it back to the class
The size of the action matters less than the fact that pupils feel like they are actually doing something.
Tip: Pupils who feel part of the solution worry significantly less than those who only learn about the problem. Action is the intervention.
5. Be honest about what you don’t know
You don’t have all the answers. The science doesn’t either – not about timelines, not about exact outcomes, not about how quickly solutions will scale.
Being honest about uncertainty could be reassuring. It signals that this is a genuinely complex situation being thought about carefully, rather than something that’s already decided. It also models intellectual honesty, which is exactly the kind of thinking we want pupils to develop.
6. Look at who is already doing something
I remember using this for natural disasters and scary news stories. And it’s an effective tool against eco-anxiety. Look for the people doing something good is always a reassuring excercise.
Stories of community energy projects, rewilding schemes, school gardens, youth climate networks, and local businesses going net zero are all available. Use them. Show pupils that the response to the climate crisis is widespread, involved all kind of people (especially people like them) – and has loads of benefits.
A word about your own anxiety
Teachers have climate anxiety too. Research from the Frontiers in Psychology (2024) study on integrating mental health into climate education found that educators themselves often feel underprepared, overwhelmed, and uncertain about how to handle the emotional weight of this subject.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to be the person with all the answers, or the one who holds everyone else’s distress together. You just need to be available and honest.
What to avoid
- Disaster framing – leading with apocalypse leaves nowhere to go
- False reassurance – telling pupils it’ll all be fine when you don’t know that
- Overloading – too much information at once, without emotional processing time
- Leaving the topic without closure – always end with some form of action or forward movement
- Treating anxiety as a problem to be fixed – it’s often a sign of caring, not of crisis
- Ignoring it altogether – silence on the subject sends its own message
The bottom line
Climate anxiety in the classroom isn’t a reason to teach less about climate change. It’s a reason to teach it better.
Pupils are already worried. There is so much information is already out there – on social media, in the news, in conversations at home. What schools can offer that nowhere else can is a structured, supported space to engage with the topic honestly, to ask questions, to feel the emotions, and to find a way through them.
For support with climate science training, curriculum embedding, or building staff confidence in this area, get in touch.
Further reading and references
Greenpeace UK (2023/2025) — Majority of under-12s worried about climate change
GOV.UK — Climate change and the mental health of children and young people
Frontiers in Psychology (2024) — Integrating mental health into climate change education
PMC (2025) — Eco-anxiety, knowledge and action in primary school-aged children, East London
UCL — A whole curriculum approach to addressing the climate crisis
National Education Union — Resources for tackling the climate crisis
Office for Climate Education — 7 tips for teaching climate change in the classroom
