Abstract Background Climate change is seriously affecting human survival and development, and the anxiety caused by it is becoming increasingly prominent. How to alleviate people's climate change anxiety, improve the ecological environment, and promote the formation of green lifestyles among people, especially young people, is an important topic worth exploring. This study examined the relationship between climate change anxiety and pro-environment behaviors and the underlying psychological mechanism in the adolescents based on the proposed moderated mediation model. Methods This study explored the crucial role of future self-continuity between climate change anxiety (CCA) and pro-environmental behaviors (PEB) in adolescents and examined the moderating role of green self-efficacy. In this study, 1851 middle school students in four grades of junior high school and senior high school were selected for the questionnaire survey. Results The results showed that (1) in both middle and high school grades, there was a significant negative correlation between climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors; future self-continuity was significantly positively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors; green self-efficacy was negatively correlated with climate change anxiety and positively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors; (2) climate change anxiety negatively predicted pro-environmental behaviors, and compared with middle school grades, high school grade adolescents' climate change anxiety was significantly predicted pro-environmental behaviors. Future self-continuity mediated the relationship between climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors in both grades. (3) Green self-efficacy moderated the second half of the mediating pathway among middle school-aged adolescents. In contrast, the moderating effect of green self-efficacy was not significant in high school grades. Future self-continuity had a greater impact on pro-environmental behaviors in the high green self-efficacy group compared to the low green self-efficacy group. Conclusion The results of this study suggest that there is a moderated mediation model between adolescent climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors, with different mediating and moderating effects among adolescents in various grade levels. This has important implications for targeting the alleviation of adolescent climate anxiety and fostering their pro-environmental behaviors.
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Qin et al. (2024) studied this question.
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