Climate Worry Runs High Among Rural Turkish Teens, Linked to Anxiety and Social Media Use

Climate change is no longer an abstract threat discussed only in scientific journals and policy briefs. For many adolescents, it has become a persistent source of emotional distress that shapes how they think about their futures. A new cross-sectional study conducted in a rural district of Türkiye now offers one of the clearest snapshots to date of how deeply climate-related worry penetrates the daily lives of high school students outside major urban centers, and how tightly that worry is entangled with generalized anxiety symptoms.

The research, published in BMC Public Health by Yasin Sağlam, a public health specialist and District Health Director in Vezirköprü, Samsun, surveyed 782 students in grades 9 through 12 across all public high schools in the district between April and June 2026. Participants completed a sociodemographic questionnaire along with two validated instruments: the Climate Change Worry Scale, or CCWS, which quantifies the intensity of climate-related concern, and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale, known as GAD-7, a widely used clinical screening tool for generalized anxiety symptoms. The study was approved by the Samsun University Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee and carried out with written informed consent from parents or guardians of participants under 18, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline numbers are striking. The mean CCWS score among the students was 30.31 with a standard deviation of 9.54, and a median of 30.0 with an interquartile range of 23.0 to 37.0. More alarming from a clinical standpoint, the mean GAD-7 score was 8.78 with a standard deviation of 6.58, and 353 students, or 45.1 percent of the sample, scored at or above the GAD-7 clinical cut-off of 10, the threshold conventionally used to flag probable generalized anxiety disorder. In other words, nearly half of the adolescents surveyed were experiencing anxiety symptoms at a level that would typically warrant clinical evaluation, and their climate worry scores were far from trivial.

The correlation between the two measures was the study’s most consequential statistical finding. Climate change worry and generalized anxiety scores were moderately correlated, with a Spearman coefficient of 0.573 and a p-value below 0.001. This means that students who worried more intensely about climate change also tended to report more generalized anxiety symptoms, and vice versa. The relationship is correlational rather than causal, so the data cannot determine whether climate worry drives anxiety, whether anxious individuals are more prone to ruminate on global threats, or whether both share common underlying drivers. But the strength of the association, in a sample of this size, makes it difficult to dismiss as statistical noise.

Multiple linear regression analysis revealed which factors independently predicted climate change worry. Female sex emerged as the strongest sociodemographic predictor, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.302. The GAD-7 score itself was the single strongest predictor overall at 0.339, followed closely by heavy social media use, defined as more than six hours per day, which carried a beta of 0.275. Reporting an extreme weather event in the local area within the past year contributed a smaller but still significant effect at 0.106, and school type also independently predicted worry levels. Together, these variables explained 43.7 percent of the variance in climate change worry, with an adjusted R-squared of 0.430, a substantial proportion for research on psychological phenomena in real-world populations.

The demographic patterns within the raw data reinforce the regression findings. Median CCWS scores were markedly higher among female students than male students, at 34.0 versus 26.0, a difference with a p-value below 0.001. Students who reported experiencing an extreme weather event in their area during the previous year scored higher on climate worry than those who did not, with medians of 33.0 versus 30.0 and a p-value of 0.005. Most dramatically, climate worry rose steadily across categories of self-reported social media use: students spending less than one hour daily on social platforms had a median CCWS score of 25.0, those using social media between one and six hours scored a median of 30.0, and those exceeding six hours per day reached a median of 36.0, with the overall difference significant at p below 0.001.

The social media gradient deserves particular attention. A dose-response pattern of this kind, where worry increases stepwise with each increment of exposure time, is consistent with the hypothesis that digital information environments amplify climate-related distress among adolescents. Constant exposure to climate news, disaster imagery, and online discourse about environmental collapse may keep the threat psychologically salient in ways that traditional media or school curricula do not. The study cannot prove causation, since it is possible that students who are already more worried about climate change seek out more climate-related content online. But the consistency of the gradient across usage categories, combined with the independent predictive power of heavy use in the regression model, strengthens the case that social media plays a meaningful role in shaping the emotional landscape of climate concern among teenagers.

The finding that local experience of extreme weather independently predicts climate worry adds an important geographic dimension. Rural districts like Vezirköprü are often assumed to be insulated from the psychological effects of climate change because they lack the dense media environments and activist cultures of large cities. Yet direct encounters with floods, droughts, storms, or heatwaves in one’s own community appear to translate abstract global narratives into concrete personal vulnerability. This suggests that as extreme weather events become more frequent under continued warming, the mental health burden on rural adolescents may grow even if their communities remain far from the coastal megacities that dominate climate coverage.

The high prevalence of generalized anxiety symptoms in the sample, with 45.1 percent at or above the clinical cut-off, also warrants independent concern regardless of its relationship to climate worry. Adolescent anxiety is a well-documented public health problem, and rural areas frequently lack adequate mental health services. The study’s findings suggest that school-based interventions addressing climate-related distress could serve a dual purpose: they may reduce a specific source of worry while simultaneously providing an entry point for identifying students with broader anxiety disorders who need clinical support. The author recommends that school-based mental health and climate literacy programs address climate-related distress, with particular attention to female students and heavy social media users, the two groups identified as most vulnerable.

Published as an open-access article in BMC Public Health on 16 October 2026, the study carries the DOI 10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2 and adds to a growing international literature on eco-anxiety, the term increasingly used to describe chronic worry about environmental degradation. What distinguishes this contribution is its rural focus and its use of a validated clinical anxiety measure alongside a dedicated climate worry scale in the same sample. As climate change accelerates and extreme weather becomes more common, understanding how adolescents in less-studied settings process these threats will be essential for designing mental health support that meets them where they are. This study provides a rigorous baseline for that effort in rural Türkiye and a template for similar research elsewhere.

Subject of Research: Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among rural Turkish high school students

Article Title: Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among high school students in a rural district of Türkiye: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Sağlam, Y. (2026). Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among high school students in a rural district of Türkiye: a cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2

Keywords: climate change, eco-anxiety, generalized anxiety, adolescent mental health, social media, extreme weather, Türkiye, high school students, public health, GAD-7, Climate Change Worry Scale, rural health