As clinicians and public health researchers long engaged with climate change and health, we do not question the reality of the climate crisis or the urgency of mitigation and adaptation [1,2]. We strongly support climate education for adolescents. Yet this very support compels us to raise a difficult question: is the current alarm-driven model of climate education becoming self-defeating? By framing adaptive concern as a mental health epidemic, we may be manufacturing patients rather than mobilising citizens—and undermining the very credibility that climate science needs to sustain action over the decades ahead.

The evidence base for this epidemic narrative is far weaker than public discourse suggests. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis found that while 59% of youth reported ever worrying about climate change, validated clinical scales placed mean symptom scores close to “almost none” [3]. This is not a minor methodological footnote. It reveals a systematic conflation of normal emotional response with psychopathology, driven by highly inconsistent definitions and measurement methods across studies. When 59% is reported as “nearly 60% suffer from climate anxiety,” the substitution is not merely imprecise—it actively misleads policy and risks medicalising legitimate political and existential youth concerns.

This conflation creates a credibility trap. An umbrella review synthesising 32 systematic reviews and meta-analyses found no class I evidence for climate-related mental health outcomes, and only about 5% of associations reached convincing highly suggestive status [4]. Yet the epidemic framing has already entered policy discourse and classroom practice. If subsequent research fails to confirm clinical universality, the public may conclude that climate science has cried wolf—not on the climate itself, but on its psychological impacts. Epistemic humility in the face of incomplete evidence is not climate denial; it is a safeguard for climate education's long-term legitimacy.

Crucially, existing research indicates that climate anxiety correlates more strongly with exposure to climate change information through media than with direct experience of climate disasters [5]. Meanwhile, a study of Italian adolescents found that climate worry predicted more pro-environmental attitudes, suggesting an adaptive, non-pathological mobilising function [6]. The same climatic facts, delivered through doom-laden versus solution-oriented narratives, may produce markedly different psychological outcomes: the former may activate helplessness and avoidance, while the latter may activate self-efficacy and participatory motivation. Unless information delivery is treated as an independent variable, researchers cannot determine whether observed anxiety reflects actual threat exposure or pedagogical choice.

We therefore propose three immediate corrections. First, climate education programmes must systematically test narrative framing as an experimental variable, comparing threat-oriented narratives with efficacy-oriented narratives in terms of their differential effects on adolescent mental health and behavioural intention. Second, assessments must distinguish climate worry from clinical anxiety disorder using functional impairment criteria—including social functioning, academic performance, and limitation of daily activities—rather than symptom checklists alone. Third, evidence syntheses must explicitly label evidence grades, preventing low-certainty findings from hardening into classroom certainty and avoiding the packaging of preliminary evidence as established fact.

Labelling non-clinical worry as an epidemic may divert limited mental health resources and, because methodological exaggeration weakens scientific credibility, risk undermining public trust in climate science itself. When alarm-driven narratives are overused, adolescents may develop climate fatigue or psychological numbing, reducing long-term willingness to engage.

Precision is not amplification; mobilisation is not intimidation. Climate education must inspire action without sacrificing the credibility it needs to sustain that action. Protecting adolescent mental health and protecting the legitimacy of climate science are not competing priorities—they are the same priority. Better evidence and more refined messaging design can enable climate education to cultivate ecologically responsible citizens while safeguarding the already fragile mental health of young people. This is not merely care for the next generation. It is a safeguard for the long-term credibility of climate science itself.