Welcome to Insight Faster, a Podcast by MDPI. This is Episode 1—Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis with Dr. Panu Pihkala. Sustainability will be the theme of the rest of our lives; it should’ve been the theme of our lives so far. It affects every single one of us in profoundly different ways. One of the more often inconspicuous and yet equally damaging impacts is the way that it affects everyone’s mental health.

Dr. Panu Pihkala and climate anxiety

Anxiety regarding the ecological crisis is natural, it is after all a serious, global problem, but Eco-Anxiety is notoriously difficult to characterize. We sat down with Dr. Panu Pihkala, a leading interdisciplinary researcher on the topic from the University of Helsinki and author of Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco and Climate Anxiety in MDPI’s Sustainability journal. The article has since attracted more than 10,000 full-text reads and more than 30 citations. We’ll talk about what Eco-Anxiety is and why it can be both incredibly challenging and provide opportunities for positive change, whilst touching on the psychology of COVID-19 and how its psychology relates to the psychology of Eco-Anxiety.

Dr. Pihkala’s article Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis An Analysis of Eco and Climate Anxiety can be found here. And his more recent article Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education, also published in Sustainability, can be found here.

In 2021, Dr. Pihkala also co-authored a paper published in The Lancet on children and youth climate anxiety which Nature described as a “landmark study”. You can find it here.

Along with some of the huge amount of media coverage that it received here: Vice; CNBC; BBC; The Guardian

To find out more about this subject (or pretty much anything else), or to submit a paper to any of MDPI’s journals, head over to the MDPI website. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about on the MDPI Podcast, email me at: jasper.clow@mpdi.com