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Eco-anxiety, heat and glaciers

Eco-anxiety, heat and glaciers

What the psychologist interviewed by Today argues

Ivan Iacob, general secretary of the Associazione unitaria psicologi italiani, told the Italian outlet Today that eco-anxiety sits outside the register of clinical diagnoses: it works as a form of apprehension tied to the environmental crisis and its consequences for the years ahead, widespread above all among teenagers and young adults, who have a long horizon in front of them. His recommendation sounds like an invitation to restraint: better to avoid medicalising emotions that, within certain boundaries, remain understandable responses to concrete problems.

The interesting passage arrives right afterwards. Iacob separates the kind of fear that pushes people to act from the kind that paralyses them: once the unease turns pervasive, disturbs sleep, eats into study and work and leaves a sense of powerlessness behind, the picture changes. And he raises an awkward question: does that tension come from the facts alone, or does the way they get narrated amplify it?

When I started looking at the sky with suspicion

Until a few years ago the weather belonged, for me, to the category of small talk in the lift. Now it doesn’t. Hailstorms that smash through skylights, whirlwinds that rip roofs off warehouses, tropical downpours that turn a street into a torrent in twenty minutes: these episodes have entered my private list of things that unsettle me. There is no permanent state of alarm here, though no serenity either, and the intermediate formula still lacks a decent name.

Above everything else sits the ice that keeps disappearing. It strikes me harder than any thunderstorm, perhaps because it amounts to a quiet loss, with no sirens and no live broadcasts. And the figures published in recent days offer little comfort.

The Marmolada lost nine hectares in twelve months

The eighth Participatory Glaciological Campaign on the Marmolada, run by the Geography Museum of the University of Padua together with Arpav and the Italian Glaciological Foundation, closed 2026 with yet another negative record. The glaciated surface fell from 92 to 83 hectares within a single year. The front withdrew by an average of 23 metres, three times the eight metres measured the previous season, while in the western sector the retreat reaches 120 metres over two years.

Mauro Varotto, from the Paduan university, chose words that are hard to file away: should summers like the one just ended repeat themselves, the queen of the Dolomites would have roughly a decade of life left. The surveyors also found crevasses filled with meltwater in the area that gave way in 2022, when the collapse of the serac killed eleven people. Gianni Marigo of Arpav recorded at altitude the most intense warm season on the Dolomites since at least 1991.

The Italian Alps are missing 170 km² of ice compared with sixty years ago

The wider picture points the same way. The report from Carovana dei ghiacciai, the campaign run by Legambiente, counts more than 170 square kilometres of glacial area vanished from the Italian Alps across six decades. The Adamello, the largest on the Italian side, pulled back 265 metres between 2023 and 2025. The Forni, in Valtellina, has withdrawn three kilometres since 2000 and thins by ten centimetres on scorching days. The Lower Coolidge, on Monviso, has even been downgraded to a glacieret. At the end of August a portion of the summit cavity of the Montasio, in Friuli, collapsed.

Meanwhile the freezing level stayed above 4,800 metres into the first days of September. People who have walked those mountains for a few decades describe landscapes their children will never see.

Summer 2026 was Italy’s hottest since 1950

The National Research Council confirmed the sensation almost everyone had in town: 24.3 degrees of seasonal average, a value never touched since 1950. The record belonged to 2003, the summer that stayed in the memory of anyone who lived through it, standing at 23.6 degrees and now slipping to second place by seven tenths. August marked 25.6 degrees, meaning 5.2 above the 1951-1980 average, and snatched the monthly record from August 2024, which had stopped at 24.6. July and August both led the historical series, a circumstance never seen before with two consecutive months. Across roughly 70% of the national territory the gap exceeded one degree, across 40% it exceeded two. Researcher Lorenzo Arcidiaco suggests the whole of 2026 may end up as the warmest year of the past seven decades.

Translated into daily life: shutters down at ten in the morning, grocery shopping postponed until sunset, weekends sacrificed. The blistering weeks kept us shut indoors for entire days, and climatic confinement bears a strong resemblance to the sort we experienced for other reasons a few years back. I wrote about it too when covering the empty umbrellas in Abruzzo, where seaside tourism picked up the bill for an impossible July.

How many extreme events the CittàClima observatory records each year

Anyone who dreads hail and swirling wind is not fantasising. The CittàClima Observatory run by Legambiente counted 376 extreme phenomena in 2025, 5.9% more than the 355 of the year before, against 60 in 2015. In detail: 139 floods from intense rainfall, 86 cases of wind damage, up by 28.3%, 37 river overflows, 33 landslides, 31 ruinous hailstorms. Lombardy, Sicily and Tuscany lead the regional ranking. Between January and August 2026 the same source has already logged more than 70 in the Alpine area.

These numbers move the conversation from the ground of perception to that of technical surveys. A domestic proof sits under my own home: the building where I live went up recently and we are already dealing with water seeping in. The developers put it down to climate change, a formula that I suspect works beautifully as an excuse for cost-cutting workmanship too. Still, rainfall now arrives concentrated and violent, with volumes that yesterday’s gutters were never designed to carry away. Something around us behaves differently, and residents’ meetings register it before conferences do.

Who reports eco-anxiety in Italy and worldwide, according to surveys

The research coordinated by Caroline Hickman and published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 questioned ten thousand young people aged 16 to 25 across ten countries. Some 59% described themselves as very or extremely alarmed, 75% judged the future frightening, over 45% reported negative effects on everyday activities.

In Italy the Unicef-YouTrend survey found that 24% of respondents know the term eco-anxiety and 22% recognise experiences compatible with that definition, while 7% report weekly physical symptoms. The most striking finding concerns parenthood: among the under-45s, 32% say that fear of the climate crisis discourages the wish to have children. Istat, for its part, records 70.3% of teenagers aged 14 to 19 worried about global warming.

The weight of the narrative, between constant alarm and minimisation

Here Iacob’s reasoning deserves room. The mind reacts to the quantity, the frequency and the vocabulary of the news it receives, besides direct experience. Information built entirely on urgency inflates the perception of danger; information built on reassurance deflates it beyond what is reasonable. In between lies a narrow, poorly frequented space, because it generates no clicks.

Anyone who works with words knows this ridge well. The rhetoric of permanent emergency wears attention down in the same manner as toxic positivity at work: both end up disqualifying the real feelings of whoever is listening.

One useful term in this vocabulary comes from the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht: solastalgia, the distress of those who watch their own environment transform while still living inside it. It describes rather well the sentiment of someone who returns to childhood paths and finds a landscape they no longer recognise.

Why the collective response matters as much as individual resilience

Another element in the interview strikes me as decisive: after a destructive event, the reaction of the community weighs enormously. Family networks, reachable services, institutions capable of intervening and trustworthy public communication all reduce the sense of powerlessness. Psychological wellbeing depends on the event suffered as much as on the resources available for getting through it.

Put another way: maintenance of riverbanks, urban adaptation plans, genuine shade in cities, comprehensible warnings. Much of the calm that people lack gets built through public works rather than breathing exercises.

How I live with a worry that will not go away

There will be no consoling checklist at the end of this piece. My unease rests on documented ground and will stay there, probably for good. What I attempt is to keep it in a workable shape: reading sources that measure instead of shouting, limiting the daily dose of catastrophe on streaming, tending to matters within my reach, from the energy consumption of my flat to professional choices, including the way I write about AI and sustainability.

I don’t go up mountains, high altitude has never featured among my desires and I doubt that will change. Yet I would like the glaciers to stay where they are, even without my going to check on them in person: some landscapes are good to know intact, including the ones that belong to somebody else.

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Chiara Bonifazi