A feeling with no address
The anxiety keeps climbing anyway, and the young people carrying it are already doing everything we told them to do, which leaves them holding a feeling with no address while the decisions that would give it one are taken somewhere they have never been invited.
Published: 03:09 PM,Sep 02,2026 | EDITED : 07:09 PM,Sep 02,2026
Last week’s footage from Nepal asks the eye to accept something it doesn’t understand. One moment, the valley is green and legible, its river contained between fields, roads and houses; the next, a brown front of ice, rock, mud and uprooted trees is carrying those boundaries away. The camera records what the person behind it has barely enough time to realise.
One caption beneath the footage declared that there is no adapting to climate collapse. Grief makes the sentence understandable, and the week’s own evidence makes it incomplete, since the warning that reached hundreds of thousands of people downstream began with one official picking up a telephone, and a school principal moved 1,643 students uphill because he understood what the message meant for the ground he was standing on. Nothing available could stop the mountain, and a great deal available could move those children in the minutes remaining.
This brings into picture what we have been going through since seeing the footage hour after hour for the past week: climate anxiety. Two studies I helped lead for the Arab Youth Council for Climate Change surveyed young people across the 22 Arab League states, and found climate anxiety had nearly tripled between them, with roughly 70 per cent reporting they felt anxious about the future of the environment. Young women carried it disproportionately, reporting severe anxiety at 34 per cent against 26 per cent of young men.
The same work found something I did not sit with long enough at the time. Some 98 per cent of those young people reported having made environmentally conscious choices in their own lives over the previous year. Near-universal personal action was already stacked on top of anxiety that personal action was never built to relieve, since nothing in a young person’s household habits reaches the systems their helplessness was actually about.
Research published this year across participants in Egypt and Saudi Arabia complicates it further. Anxiety measured at the outset predicted environmental action 6 weeks later, while the reverse did not hold. The strange result concerned confidence, because participants scoring highest on general belief in their own capability reported the fewest environmental actions of all, and the link between anxiety and action ran strongest among those who felt least capable in general terms. The authors decline to choose among the explanations available to them.
Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, the distinction they draw is between a person who believes they can handle life and a person who believes one named thing they do changes one named outcome. General confidence spreads evenly across a life and settles nowhere in particular; the second kind has an address, which is why the principal walked toward the hill and not toward the river.
We have built a decade of environmental communication on the first kind. Awareness weeks, pledges, the steady encouragement to feel equal to the century. The anxiety keeps climbing anyway, and the young people carrying it are already doing everything we told them to do, which leaves them holding a feeling with no address while the decisions that would give it one are taken somewhere they have never been invited. So maybe after you read this, ask the young person in your circle what it would take to get them into one of those rooms, and then ask yourself who you would have to call.