Assessing the Presence of Eco-Anxiety in the General Population: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Eco-anxiety is emerging as a response to worsening environmental conditions. However, several gaps hinder the estimation of this phenomenon worldwide. This review aims to provide a measure of eco-anxiety control by those factors that may affect its prevalence assessment. Methods: The review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines, and the protocol was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024556132). PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO databases were interrogated. Cross-sectional studies in English and Italian languages assessing eco-anxiety through validated questionnaires were considered. The quality assessment was conducted using the adapted Newcastle–Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale. Results: Sixty-nine articles published between 2020 and 2025 were included. Of these, 60 studies were meta-analyzed, for a total sample size exceeding 65,000 participants across different countries and cultural contexts. The overall pooled mean eco-anxiety level was approximately 34.8/100 (95% CI: 29.6–39.9), corresponding to a moderate level of eco-anxiety, with women scoring higher than men (p < 0.05). Assessment tool and country were also shown as significant predictors of eco-anxiety, while age did not seem to play a significant role. Conclusions: Though further rigorous research is needed in this field, focusing on these variables could help to design targeted strategies that address environmental concerns and support mental well-being and resilience towards environmental challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".