Go out or stress out? Exploring nature connectedness and cumulative stress as resilience and vulnerability factors in different manifestations of climate anxiety

Given the increasing severity of the climate crisis and, with it, rising climate anxiety, it is imperative to understand what climate anxiety is, how it functions, and how people can cope with it constructively. Nevertheless, research has often mixed different conceptualizations and operationalizations of climate anxiety, yielding sometimes seemingly contradictory findings. This study contributes with a more nuanced and structured approach by 1) exploring systematically how climate anxiety manifests (i.e., investigating the existence of subgroups), and 2) investigating vulnerability and resilience factors that might explain belonging to these different subgroups. We analyzed answers of N = 2052 German-speaking survey respondents, stratified for age, gender, and education, who provided information on different facets of their climate anxiety (namely climate-anxious appraisal, affect, and potentially related impairment). Using latent profile analysis, we identified four subgroups with different manifestations of climate anxiety: climate-anxious impaired (8.5%), climate-anxious less impaired (17.5%), climate-anxious functioning (41%), and non-climate anxious (33%). Subsequent multinomial logistic regression revealed that high nature connectedness, male gender, and young age but not exposure to cumulative stressors (i.e., combination of stressors such as unemployment and low presence of high-quality nature in one's living environment) were potential vulnerability factors to belong to the climate-anxious impaired group compared to all other groups. Our person-centered approach nuances the study of climate anxiety and advances possibilities to study constructive coping with climate anxiety.