Climate Distress and the Work of Care: On Becoming and Worlding Otherwise

ABSTRACT This review article brings together recent work on climate distress and reparative framings of care, drawing in particular on Carr's (2022) recent call to turn to “tangible work of climate crisis” to explore the potential posed by climate distress to become and world otherwise . First, I reflect on existential perspectives on climate distress, looking to theories of anxiety, horror, grief, and trauma to understand it as a form of “unworlding” (Halberstam, 2024), that is, as a disrupter to business‐as‐usual lifeworlds and an indicator of the need for both personal and political change. I then move to explore reparative geographies, which emphasise the critical work of care, repair, and maintenance. What potential lies in rethinking climate distress as a matter of work? What possibilities might there be for research if we think through climate distress through a modality of repair? Recent work suggests that the goal of engaging with climate distress is “affective transformation” (Verlie 2022), that is, to work through ‘negative’ feelings in order to become capable of not only bearing the weight of climate crisis, but of generating more livable worlds as well. Scholarship on care, which has long held the radical potential for surviving precarious worlds and for bringing other worlds into being, can serve here as a useful guiding framework. In bringing together these two bodies of work, I hope to elucidate how thinking through climate distress as a matter of reparative work could be generative for future directions of geographic research on the everyday work of climate distress.