Can nature and climate worries predict future social behavior in the same way consumer sentiment predicts buying and investing trends?

This idea comes from a recent paper by Professor Emeritus Ralf Buckley of Griffith University. Buckley points to the international Global Burden of Disease Study, which shows that anxiety and depression are widespread and getting worse.

“Economic costs are up to 16% of global GDP, with an average of 19 days per year lost for every person worldwide,” he explains. “Many factors contribute to this, including the current climate, biodiversity, and livelihood crises. Professor Pienkowski’s article notes that health-sector responses like counseling and medication only treat symptoms, not the underlying social causes. Anxiety and its economic costs will keep rising unless we make major changes to our global economic and political systems.”

Buckley argues that we can use the current levels and types of eco-anxiety to gauge people’s expectations for the planet’s future.

“Higher anxieties may mean that more people adopt ‘lie-flat’ lifestyles, with fewer children and lower financial ambitions,” he continues. “Lie-flat social changes at large scale are just what is needed to reduce human impacts on the Earth, before it is incapable of supporting its still-growing human population.”

Buckley suggests, therefore, that if we can track the levels of eco-anxiety and then match them to lifestyle choices, then we can better predict the changes that are likely to occur to people across the world as a result of climate change.