Williams, Marc O.Buekers, JorenCastaño Vinyals, GemmaCid Ibeas, Rafael deDelgado Ortiz, LauraEspinosa Díaz, AnaGarcía Aymerich, JudithKoch, SarahKogevinas, ManolisViola, MarcoWhitmarsh, LorraineChevance, Guillaume2024-11-122024-11-122024Williams MO, Buekers J, Castaño-Vinyals G, Cid R, Delgado-Ortiz L, Espinosa A, et al. Climate anxiety and its association with health behaviours and generalized anxiety: An intensive longitudinal study. Br J Health Psychol. 2024 Nov;29(4):1080-95. DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.127461359-107Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/68490Objectives: The United Nations recognize the importance of balancing the needs of people and the planetary systems on which human health relies. This paper investigates the role that climate change has on human health via its influence on climate anxiety. Design: We conducted an intensive longitudinal study. Methods: Participants reported levels of climate anxiety, generalized anxiety and an array of health behaviours at 20 consecutive time points, 2 weeks apart. Results: A network analysis shows climate anxiety and generalized anxiety not to covary, and higher levels of climate anxiety not to covary with health behaviours, except for higher levels of alcohol consumption at the within-participant level. Generalized anxiety showed completely distinct patterns of covariation with health behaviours compared with climate anxiety. Conclusions: Our findings imply that climate anxiety, as conceptualized and measured in the current study, is not in itself functionally impairing in terms of associations with unhealthy behaviours, and is distinct from generalized anxiety. The results also imply that interventions to induce anxiety about the climate might not always have significant impacts on health and well-being.application/pdfeng© 2024 The Author(s). British Journal of Health Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12746Climate anxietyClimate distressGeneralized anxietyHealth behavioursIntensive longitudinal studyNetwork analysisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess