The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people

NEW YORK (AP) — Anxiety, grief, anger, fear, helplessness. The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people.

Many worry about what the future holds, and a daily grind of climate anxiety and distress can lead to sleeplessness, an inability to focus and worse. Some young people wonder whether it’s moral to bring children into the world. Many people grieve for the natural world.

Activists, climate psychologists and others in the fight against climate change have a range of ways to build resilience and help manage emotions. Some ideas:

Feeling isolated? Find ways to connect with like-minded people and help nature, said climate psychologist Laura Robinson in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There are many ways to get involved.

Work locally to convince more residents to give up grass lawns and increase biodiversity with native plants, for instance. Help establish new green spaces, join projects to protect water, develop wildlife corridors, or decrease pesticide use to save frogs, insects and birds. Work to get the word out on turning down nighttime lighting to help birds and lightning bugs.

“I see people struggling with these emotions across the age range,” said Robinson. “I have parents who are themselves really struggling with their own feelings and really worried about their children in the future.”

Climate news and the onslaught of disaster and mayhem in general has become heavy and overwhelming for many with the rise of social media and mobile phone use. Try scheduling breaks from notifications on your phone or stepping back from the news cycle in other ways.

Consider the idea of a “positivity sandwich,” where you begin with a good piece of news, followed by a harder tidbit, then finish with a second feel-good story.

Phoebe Yu, 39, gave up a cushy job in health technology to work on an MBA with a focus on sustainability. She started a business selling sponges made from the luffa gourd. And she does it all while raising her 6-year-old son with her husband in Fremont, California.

“I am generally a very happy person and I’m very optimistic. And I’m still that, but sometimes it becomes very difficult to manage. Like, what will happen and thinking about the long term,” she said. “At points, I’ve regretted bringing a child into this world, knowing how things could get much, much worse.”

Part of managing her own emotions is trying to model sustainable behaviors for her son while educating him on the importance of helping the environment. The family drives an electric vehicle. They don’t eat meat and have encouraged extended family to do the same. They recycle, compost and limit travel by air.

“I try to explain things to my son so he can at least have some understanding of how the world and the ecosystem works as a whole,” Yu said. “I do think kids are able to absorb that and turn that into some level of action.”

Britnee Reid teaches middle school science for Gaston Virtual Academy, a K-12 virtual public school based in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Reid participated in a pilot project for a free teacher tool kit on climate put together by the National Environmental Education Foundation and the Climate Mental Health Network, a collective of community advocates working on the emotional impacts of climate change.

The kit is full of ways to help teachers support students’ mental health and manage their own climate-related emotions. One of the exercises involves students documenting their interactions with the natural world in an environmental timeline. Laying it all out often stirs action, Reid said.

“They can be anxious, they can be angry, they can feel fearful, but they’re like these go-getters of, ‘I’m going to make the change in this world.’ There’s kind of two truths at once where they feel scared but they also feel like, you know, I can do something about this,” she said.

“The timelines," Reid said, "provided some good, rich conversations.”

Psychotherapist Patricia Hasbach, just outside of Eugene, Oregon, has written several books on eco-psychology and eco-therapy and has taught graduate students on those topics.

“We incorporate nature into the healing process,” she said. “And we address a person’s relationship with the natural world. Certainly with climate change, eco-therapy has a huge role to play.”

One of her most important missions is helping people find their words to talk about climate change in pursuit of resilience.

“There have been some studies done that show an increased number of young people reporting concern, like 84% of young people in the U.S. reporting concern about climate change, but only like 59% of them think that other people are as concerned as they are,” Hasbach said.

That, she said, contributes to inaction and feelings of anxiety, depression or isolation.

Climate scientist Kate Marvel, a physicist and author of the new book “Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About our Changing Planet,” urges people to think differently about their place in preserving the environment.

“A lot of times, the anxiety and the hopelessness comes from a feeling of powerlessness. And I don’t think any of us is powerless,” she said.

“I think collectively, we’re incredibly powerful," Marvel said. "The atmosphere cares about what all of us together are doing, and I think you can have much more impact if you think of yourself as part of the collective.”

FILE - People are silhouetted against the sky at sunset as they walk at Shawnee Mission park, Sept. 26, 2024, in Shawnee, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

FILE - Visitors walk down a ramp after climbing Shark Valley observation point in Everglades National Park, Fla., Nov. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

FILE - Rosei Warren hauls compost to a garden plot in preparation for planting vegetables at the Ivanhoe neighborhood community garden, April 9, 2025, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

FILE - Eaton Fire evacuee Alyson Granaderos, left, sobs while trying to comfort her son, Ceiba Phillips, 11, as he visits their home for the first time since the fire in Altadena, Calif., Feb. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)