Climate Change Stress Leads to Diverse Coping Approaches Depending on Political Beliefs

Climate change is a source of anxiety and stress. To be resilient to the changes that are occurring, individuals must cope with that stress. Two studies (Study 1 N = 340, Study 2 N = 274) conducted via MTurk examined variation in coping strategy use among Americans who reported some concern about climate change to understand generally how people cope with such stress, and whether it can be predicted from their level of climate change concern, political ideology, and their dispositional coping style. Overall, greater climate concern predicted greater use of most coping strategies. However, political ideology moderated the relationships between concern and use of certain coping strategies: conservatives who were more concerned reported greater use of avoidant strategies to cope, whereas the relationship between concern and these forms of coping for liberals was weaker. This interaction was not observed for problem-focused or social-focused coping strategies. Study 2 also examined the role of dispositional coping, finding that use of a strategy to cope with stress in general was strongly associated with use of that same strategy to deal with climate change concern. However, climate change concern remained an important predictor of coping, even when controlling for dispositional coping.