The Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change Worry for Adolescents in Madagascar

This research is being conducted in part-fulfillment of an MSc in Applied Social Research at Trinity College Dublin. Supervised by Dr. Kristin Hadfield, the project will use a quantitative dataset from the 'Catalyse' project to analyse whether the relationship between worry about climate change and mental health occurs independently of food insecurity for adolescents (aged 10-24) in three regions of Madagascar. It is anticipated that levels of climate worry, depressive symptoms, generalised anxiety symptoms, and food insecurity will all be high among participants. Climate concern and depressive symptoms are hypothesised to be positively related, as well as climate concern and anxiety symptoms. Likewise, it is expected that food insecurity will be positively correlated to symptoms of anxiety and depression. The relationship between climate concern and depressive symptoms, as well as climate concern and symptoms of anxiety, is anticipated to persist independent of the addition of a food insecurity variable.