Prioritizing environmental anxieties and mitigation strategies across eco-anxiety, climate, health, economic, and social domains

Abstract

This study assesses environmental anxieties and prioritizes strategies to address them using an integrated expert-based multi-criteria framework. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy TOPSIS are combined to identify, weight, and rank sub-anxieties across five domains: eco-anxiety, climate change anxiety, health, economic, and social anxiety. AHP results indicate that climate-related anxiety received the highest expert-assigned weight, followed by eco-anxiety, with economic, health, and social anxieties receiving comparatively lower priority within the evaluation framework. At the sub-domain level, helplessness in mitigating climate risks, intergenerational uncertainty, and fear of worsening disasters emerge as the highest-ranked concerns within the expert evaluation. Fuzzy TOPSIS prioritizes the evaluated strategies accordingly: nature-based prescribing and targeted cognitive-behavioral and acceptance-based therapies receive the highest rankings, followed by structured media diets for information hygiene; psychoeducation, mindfulness, health-protection planning, and financial-resilience counseling form a second tier of support. Sensitivity analysis across alternative weighting scenarios indicates ranking stability, supporting the robustness of the prioritization framework. The findings offer a structured prioritization framework for environmental policy and management by highlighting expert-assessed priority areas, including clinically grounded treatments, trusted information systems, health-protective infrastructure, and economic coping supports. These priorities provide a basis for future empirical validation regarding their potential contribution to reducing distress and supporting adaptive environmental governance.