The Psychological Impact On Climate change, Anxiety And SAD Disorder On Youth

ABSTRACT One of the most pervasive threats to contemporary society is climate change, with repercussions that extend well beyond ecological disruption to much broader psychological implications, especially in younger adults. This conceptual project explores the nexus of climate change-related anxiety and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) among college-aged youth, 18-25 years old. Based on contemporary literature available from 2020-2025, this research posits a comprehensive conceptual framework that explores and investigates the central relationships between climate change-related anxiety and psychological well-being, while examining its conditional relations with resilience and mediated by environmental engagement. This conceptual research relies on The Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale (HEAS) and the Seasonal Affective Disorder Questionnaire-21-item to fill a gap in contemporary research and knowledge on critical intersections and relations among climate-related psychological stress and seasonal patterns of psychological variation among young people. The proposed conceptual research design posits on C-B psychosocial stress models uniting cognitive-behaviourist psychological and theoretical orientations on psychological stress and resilience to explore salient hypotheses on this subject that require systematic testing. This conceptual research offers new implications on climate psychology literature that inform on new implications on mental health interventions and programs to assist young people to deal with psychological stressors that present new challenges to contemporary society.