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

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. Dear Editor, We want to bring into your kind notice, that we have submitted authors’ order change request form in the supplimantry tab in the system.

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Project funded by Decision-Making Consultation Base of Guangdong Province and Ceramic Industry Research Center of Hanshan Normal University (Z25023) and Guangdong Provincial Social Sciences Planning Project (GD23XYJ060). Project Grant for Chaoshan Research Institute (PSB250501). Yi Li and Muhammad Wasif Hanif contributed equally to this work.

College of Economics and Management, Hanshan Normal University, Chaozhou, 521021, China Department of Economics, COMSATS University Islamabad, Abbottabad campus, Abbottabad, Pakistan The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.