Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps

Eco-anxiety is the distress caused by climate change where people are becoming anxious about their future. The present scoping reveiw critically evaluated and synthesized the scholarly literature on eco-anxiety and reported it using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [1]. The study aims were twofold: (i) to understand how eco-anxiety was operationalized in the existing literature, and (ii) the key characteristics of eco-anxiety. Our review found that further research is needed to provide conceptual clarity of the term eco-anxiety. We found that most of the evidence comes from the Western countries, and future research is needed in the non-Western countries. Indigenous peoples, children and young people, and those connected to the natural world are most impacted by ecoanxiety and are identi fied as vulnerable. We recommend employing diverse methodologies to better understand their lived experiences of eco-anxiety. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NCND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)