A couple of months ago, I had the chance to hike around my local mountains, the Pyrenees, and the opportunity came to walk around some of the peaks of this beautiful ridge. That day, my hike took me to the area known as Ibones Azules, from which you may get to take a look at one characteristic feature of the landscape: what used to be the Picos Infiernos glacier. After two years living in the Alps, thinking about the situation that the Pyrenean glaciers are going through is a little bit heartbreaking. Since the Little Ice Age, Alpine glaciers have lost around half their surface. Pyrenean glaciers have lost 87% [1].

Amidst the joy that normally accompanies going to the mountains and enjoying nature, it is becoming increasingly common for other conversations and emotions to arise. If we were used to hearing the sentence “how beautiful it is today”, now it has become difficult for it not to be followed by an important addition: “we have to enjoy it while we can”.

It is not uncommon now to hear people reflecting on how many good years we have left to enjoy winter, the snowy mountains, and the landscapes that will eventually become something different from the ones we are used to seeing. It is a funny feeling, some mix between uneasiness and sadness with a pinch of anxiety on the side. There are already numerous studies affirming that thoughts or conversations that deal with topics related to the ecological crisis – climate change, global warming, biodiversity loss, or extreme events – are making people feel different emotions that may include anger, sadness, desperation, fear, and guilt [2]. One of the most repeated ones has a particular name: ecoanxiety.

The American Psychology Association (APA) defines ecoanxiety as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations“ [3]. Truth to be told, it is a considerable concern for the coming generations. According to certain studies at a multinational level, between 49% and 59% of the respondents were worried or very worried about climate change [4].

When discussing climate change, and more specifically, how to combat it, one of the main unknowns is how to mobilize people effectively. Generally speaking, mobilization for a cause is greatly due to an emotional factor. And it becomes important to know these emotions and the effects they may generate. For example, in the case of depression or anxiety, ecodepression and ecoanxiety have been analysed over the last few years [4]. Emotions can be considered negative or positive, but also activators or deactivators, which means that they either help to come up with a solution to the problem or not. Both of the mentioned emotions are negative, but depression is deactivating; it does not help to come up with an answer. Anxiety, even if activating, activates some sort of evasiveness of the problem. For that reason, ecoanxiety is not a good thing in the fight against climate change and for Nature: people feel overwhelmed by the troubles, and the consequence is apathy; they refuse to think about it because the mere idea, the gravity of the situation, is too much to be processed.