Mapping the global research landscape on climate change and children’s mental health: trends, themes, and inequalities

This study provides the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research on climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing (2001–2025), examining whose children’s experiences are studied and which voices shape this rapidly expanding field through a climate justice lens. We analyzed 1,217 documents from Web of Science and Scopus using co-occurrence, citation, and co-authorship analyses. The field exhibited explosive growth (22.52% annually), surging from fewer than 10 publications before 2010 to 262 in 2025. However, profound geographic inequalities revealed epistemic injustice: the United States (740 publications, 60.8%), United Kingdom (396, 32.5%), and Australia (351, 28.8%) dominated production while Small Island Developing States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and climate-vulnerable regions remained severely underrepresented despite experiencing disproportionate impacts. Nine thematic clusters emerged, with eco-anxiety, climate education, and pro-environmental behavior—reflecting Western individualistic frameworks—dominating discourse, while structural themes addressing colonialism, displacement, and systemic violence remained underdeveloped. Collaboration networks exhibited US–Australia–Europe centrality with limited Global South engagement. This concentration constitutes epistemic injustice wherein nations bearing greatest historical responsibility for emissions while experiencing buffered impacts dominate knowledge production, risking universalization of Western experiences while marginalizing the majority of the world’s climate-affected children. Addressing these inequalities requires systemic transformation: redirecting funding to Global South institutions, diversifying editorial boards, valuing diverse epistemologies, ensuring equitable partnerships, and decolonizing theoretical frameworks. Such transformation represents not merely academic fairness but a climate justice imperative essential for developing knowledge systems that center marginalized voices and inform interventions responsive to realities shaping climate vulnerability globally.

Climate change represents one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, with far-reaching implications for human health, wellbeing, and planetary survival. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented unprecedented atmospheric warming, increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and accelerating environmental degradation that threatens ecosystems and human communities worldwide (Pörtner et al., 2022). Among the populations most vulnerable to climate change impacts are children and adolescents, who face both immediate health risks from climate-related disasters and long-term psychological consequences from growing awareness of an uncertain environmental future (Vergunst and Berry, 2022). Children born today will experience the effects of climate change throughout their entire lifespans, bearing a disproportionate burden of climate-related health consequences compared to previous generations (Watts et al., 2019). However, the burden of climate impacts is not distributed equally, with children in low- and middle-income countries experiencing disproportionate harm despite contributing least to greenhouse gas emissions, raising critical questions of climate justice and epistemic equity in knowledge production about these experiences (Anjum and Aziz, 2025; Helldén et al., 2021; UNICEF, 2021). Nearly half of the world’s children—approximately one billion—live in countries classified by UNICEF as at extremely high risk from climate change impacts, the overwhelming majority of them in the Global South (UNICEF, 2021).

The psychological impacts of climate change on children and youth operate through multiple interconnected pathways. Direct exposure to climate-related disasters such as floods, wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes can result in acute psychological distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression (van Nieuwenhuizen et al., 2021; Vergunst and Berry, 2022). Recent evidence demonstrates that single extreme weather events contribute to significant negative mental health consequences in young populations, while subacute and chronic climate events also produce measurable mental health sequelae (Pardon et al., 2024). Beyond direct exposure, indirect pathways including disrupted family functioning, compromised caregiver mental health, displacement, food insecurity, and interrupted education create additional psychological burdens (World Health Organization, 2024). Climate change affects child and adolescent mental health as both a social and ecological determinant of health, a threat amplifier that exacerbates existing vulnerabilities, and a source of trauma and distress that can have cumulative developmental impacts from conception onward (Crandon et al., 2022; van Nieuwenhuizen et al., 2021).

An emerging dimension of climate-related psychological impact involves the emotional responses arising from awareness of the climate crisis itself, rather than from direct exposure to climate events. The construct of eco-anxiety, broadly defined as distress relating to environmental degradation and the climate crisis, has gained increasing attention in both scholarly literature and public discourse (Léger-Goodes et al., 2022; Malboeuf-Hurtubise et al., 2023). Eco-anxiety encompasses worry, fear, grief, and hopelessness in anticipation of climate change, and manifests as chronic concern about environmental futures and the adequacy of societal responses (Clayton and Karazsia, 2020). Research conducted across multiple countries has documented substantial levels of climate-related distress among children and young people globally, with some studies finding that the majority of surveyed youth report moderate to severe climate anxiety (Hickman et al., 2021; Lewandowski, 2024). The largest international survey to date, conducted across ten countries with 10,000 young people aged 16–25, found that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, 45% reported that climate-related feelings negatively affected their daily functioning, and over 50% reported feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, and guilt (Hickman et al., 2021). Importantly, these emotional responses often correlate with perceptions of governmental inadequacy and betrayal, as young people experience an additional layer of confusion and abandonment due to perceived adult inaction on climate change (Hickman et al., 2021; Léger-Goodes et al., 2022).

The scientific understanding of eco-anxiety and climate distress in children and youth has evolved considerably in recent years, moving from conceptualizing these responses as potential pathology to recognizing them as rational, adaptive reactions to a genuine existential threat (Marks and Hickman, 2023). Contemporary perspectives emphasize that climate anxiety is often based on constructive or practical anxiety and, although painful and distressing, does not necessarily imply mental illness (Hickman et al., 2021; Marks and Hickman, 2023). This reframing is crucial for mental health professionals working with young people, as it validates their emotional experiences while avoiding pathologization of appropriate responses to environmental crises. However, when experienced to a severe extent, climate-related distress can contribute to depressive and anxiety disorders, exacerbate existing mental health conditions, and negatively impact general wellbeing (Ramadan et al., 2023). The heterogeneity in how children and youth experience climate anxiety ranges from mild concern to medium distress to significant, severe, and critical climate distress that requires clinical intervention. Understanding this range is essential for developing appropriate support mechanisms and interventions tailored to diverse contexts and populations (Léger-Goodes et al., 2022; Malboeuf-Hurtubise et al., 2023).

Research on climate change and youth mental health has expanded dramatically in recent years, reflecting growing recognition of the urgency and complexity of this issue. The field encompasses multiple disciplines including environmental psychology, developmental psychology, climate science, public health, education, and psychiatry (van Nieuwenhuizen et al., 2021). Studies have examined diverse aspects such as coping strategies, pro-environmental behavior, climate activism, educational approaches, and the role of social and political factors in shaping climate emotions (Ojala and Bengtsson, 2019; Romano et al., 2024; Wallis and Loy, 2021). The rapid proliferation of research has generated important insights into how different demographic groups experience climate anxiety, with evidence suggesting that age, gender, direct exposure to climate impacts, geographic location, and socioeconomic status all influence climate-related psychological responses (Tam et al., 2023). For instance, systematic reviews have identified that youth from vulnerable communities or communities with strong ties to the land, such as Indigenous populations, often experience significant eco-anxiety and other mental health symptoms (Crandon et al., 2022). Additionally, longitudinal studies demonstrate age-related increases in climate worry, with concern intensifying as children transition through adolescence and develop more sophisticated cognitive capacities for understanding global threats (Sciberras and Fernando, 2022).

Despite the growing body of research, significant gaps remain in our understanding of how scholarship on climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing is organized, what themes dominate the discourse, and how research networks and collaborative structures shape knowledge production in this field. The interdisciplinary nature of this research area means that relevant studies are published across diverse outlets in psychology, education, environmental science, public health, and related disciplines, making it challenging for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to navigate the literature comprehensively. Furthermore, critical concerns have been raised about profound geographic imbalances in research production, with scholars from the Global North dominating authorship even as the Global South experiences disproportionate climate impacts (Anjum and Aziz, 2025; Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Blicharska et al., 2017; Pasgaard et al., 2015). These imbalances are not unique to climate scholarship: psychology as a discipline draws overwhelmingly on WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) samples (Henrich et al., 2010), its authors and participants remain disproportionately American and European (Arnett, 2008; Thalmayer et al., 2021), and the discipline has been slow to correct this skew even after more than a decade of critique (Rad et al., 2018). This pattern of knowledge production reflects broader issues of epistemic injustice—the unfair treatment in knowledge-related practices wherein the voices, experiences, and problems of marginalized individuals and communities are not taken seriously (Fricker, 2007; Sultana, 2025). Nations most affected by climate change, including Small Island Developing States and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, remain markedly underrepresented in psychological literature on climate change (Anjum and Aziz, 2025). This underrepresentation is not merely a matter of academic concern; it has profound implications for climate justice, as understanding the social and psychological dimensions of climate change is crucial for formulating effective and equitable adaptation strategies (Adger et al., 2013; Sultana, 2025).

The dominance of Global North perspectives in climate psychology research perpetuates epistemic coloniality—the continuation of colonial power relations through knowledge production systems that privilege Western epistemologies while marginalizing alternative ways of knowing (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Sultana, 2022, 2025). Western-centric research frameworks often emphasize individualistic approaches to climate psychology, focusing on personal behavior change and cognitive factors while potentially overlooking structural inequalities, collective action, and community-rooted responses that may be more salient in non-Western contexts (Anjum and Aziz, 2026; Aziz and Anjum, 2025). This bias extends to theoretical framings, with Western psychology often treating the environment as an external object or resource rather than recognizing the relational, interconnected worldviews prevalent in Indigenous and non-Western cosmologies (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; McGregor et al., 2020; Whyte, 2017). Addressing these epistemic injustices requires not only increasing representation of Global South scholars in climate psychology but fundamentally decolonizing knowledge production systems to center diverse epistemologies, methodologies, and ways of understanding human-environment relations (Adams et al., 2015; Reddy et al., 2021; Sultana, 2025). The patterns of knowledge production revealed through bibliometric analysis can thus illuminate structures of epistemic privilege and underprivilege that shape whose experiences of climate-related psychological impacts are studied, whose voices are heard, and whose solutions are considered legitimate (Dotson, 2014; Sultana, 2025).

Bibliometric analysis offers a powerful methodological approach for addressing these knowledge gaps by systematically mapping the intellectual structure, thematic evolution, and collaborative networks within a research field (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017; Donthu et al., 2021). Bibliometric techniques enable researchers to identify publication trends, influential authors and institutions, thematic clusters, citation patterns, and emerging research directions through quantitative analysis of large publication datasets. By applying bibliometric methods to literature on climate change and youth mental health, researchers can provide comprehensive overviews of the field’s development, reveal dominant themes and conceptual frameworks, identify research gaps and underexplored topics, and illuminate patterns of international collaboration and knowledge exchange (Anjum and Aziz, 2025; Donthu et al., 2021). Importantly, when analyzed through a climate justice lens, bibliometric studies can reveal geographic disparities in knowledge production, identify whose voices dominate scholarly discourse, and highlight regions and populations whose experiences remain understudied despite bearing disproportionate climate burdens (Anjum and Aziz, 2025; Sultana, 2025). Recent bibliometric studies in climate psychology have demonstrated the value of this approach for revealing research trends while simultaneously exposing the concentration of scholarship in wealthy, high-emission nations and the relative absence of research from climate-vulnerable regions (Anjum and Aziz, 2025; Fan et al., 2022; Wigand et al., 2022).

To date, no comprehensive bibliometric analysis has specifically examined the intersection of climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing as a discrete research domain with explicit attention to climate justice dimensions. While some bibliometric studies have explored climate psychology more broadly (Anjum and Aziz, 2025), and others have examined specific subfields such as climate change risk perception (Fan et al., 2022), emotional responses to climate change (Abdullah and Azizan, 2024; Momenpour and Choobchian, 2025), climate anxiety (Anjum et al., 2026), climate change education (Wang et al., 2024), climate-induced migration in the Global South (Aziz et al., 2025), and the broader climate change and mental health literature (Wigand et al., 2022), the particular focus on how climate change affects children and youth mental health remains unmapped from a bibliometric perspective that attends to epistemic justice and geographic equity in knowledge production. This represents a significant gap given the rapid expansion of research in this area, particularly following major global events such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, the rise of youth climate movements like Fridays for Future, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which heightened awareness of both mental health vulnerabilities and environmental threats (Ojala and Bengtsson, 2019; Wallis and Loy, 2021). Moreover, addressing this gap through a climate justice framework is essential for understanding not only what knowledge has been produced about children’s climate-related psychological experiences, but whose children’s experiences have been studied, which geographic contexts have received attention, and what epistemological frameworks have dominated the discourse (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Sultana, 2025).

Understanding the structure and evolution of research on climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing through a climate justice lens is essential for multiple stakeholder groups. For researchers, a bibliometric overview can inform future research agendas by identifying understudied geographic regions, marginalized populations, and alternative epistemological approaches that have been excluded from mainstream discourse (Sultana, 2025). For mental health professionals and educators working with young people, mapping the evidence base provides guidance on the state of knowledge while highlighting whose experiences and which contexts remain inadequately represented in existing literature (van Nieuwenhuizen et al., 2021). For policymakers and public health officials, bibliometric analysis offers insights into research priorities and geographic disparities that may reflect and perpetuate inequitable allocation of resources and attention (Anjum and Aziz, 2025). For climate justice advocates and youth organizations, particularly those in the Global South, understanding how research on young people’s climate experiences has developed can inform advocacy strategies, identify gaps between lived experiences and academic attention, and support demands for epistemic justice in climate discourse (Sultana, 2025). Finally, for international bodies and funding agencies, such analysis can reveal patterns of research concentration that may justify calls for more equitable investment in knowledge production from and about climate-vulnerable regions (Anjum and Aziz, 2025).

The present study addresses this gap by conducting a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research at the intersection of climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing published between 2001 and 2025, with explicit attention to climate justice dimensions in knowledge production. Drawing on publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, this study maps the intellectual landscape of this rapidly growing field while critically examining geographic distribution of research, collaborative networks, citation patterns, and thematic evolution through a lens attentive to epistemic equity. Specific objectives include: (1) identifying the growth trajectory of publications in this domain and analyzing temporal patterns in research expansion; (2) determining the most influential authors, institutions, journals, and their geographic distribution; (3) analyzing patterns of international collaboration and identifying potential imbalances in research networks; (4) mapping thematic clusters through keyword co-occurrence analysis to reveal dominant conceptual frameworks; (5) examining how research focus has shifted over time in response to global events and emerging social movements; and (6) critically assessing geographic disparities in knowledge production that may reflect and perpetuate epistemic injustices in climate psychology scholarship. By foregrounding climate justice as an analytical lens, this study seeks to illuminate not only what knowledge exists about climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing, but whose knowledge, from which locations, and serving which agendas (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Sultana, 2025).

Bibliometric analysis was used to map scientific literature at the intersection of climate change and the psychological wellbeing of children and youth. This method allows researchers to identify publication patterns, thematic tendencies, and collaborative structures within a defined research domain. Following established bibliometric guidelines (Donthu et al., 2021), the process involved four stages: defining the purpose of the analysis, selecting analytical techniques, collecting data, and analyzing and reporting the results.

Since this study aimed to identify trends in climate change and youth mental health within psychology, social psychology, and psychiatry, the first stage was completed by determining this objective. Although research on climate change and young people spans many disciplines, the analysis was deliberately restricted to the psychological, social-psychological, and psychiatric literature: the research questions concern mental health and psychological wellbeing specifically, and subject-area filtering yields a corpus whose keywords, sources, and citation practices can be meaningfully compared within a shared disciplinary frame (Donthu et al., 2021). The implications of this scoping decision, including the exclusion of relevant work published in neighbouring fields such as public health, education, and anthropology, are considered in the Limitations section. In the second stage, co-occurrence, co-authorship, citation, and co-citation analyses were selected to reflect the aims of the research. Co-occurrence was used to identify how key concepts are linked within the field. Co-authorship (Acedo et al., 2006) enabled the examination of collaborative structures among authors, institutions, and countries. Citation (Podsakoff et al., 2005) and co-citation analyses (Fahimnia et al., 2015) were used to identify the most influential documents, authors, and journals shaping the field.

Data sources and search strategy

Data was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus, two major databases widely used in bibliometric research. The search was conducted on 12 November 2025 at 10:14 p.m. To ensure transparency and reproducibility, the full search strings used in both databases are provided below:

Web of Science

TS = ((“climate change” OR “global warming” OR “climatic change” OR “climate crisis” OR “environmental change” OR “climate variability” OR “climate-related disaster” OR “extreme heat” OR “heatwave” OR “flood” OR “drought”) AND (child* OR adolescen* OR youth* OR “young people”)).

Scopus

TITLE-ABS-KEY((“climate change” OR “global warming” OR “climatic change” OR “climate crisis” OR “environmental change” OR “climate variability” OR “climate-related disaster” OR “extreme heat” OR “heatwave” OR “flood” OR “drought”)AND(child* OR adolescen* OR youth* OR “young people”)).

These terms were chosen because they capture climate-related hazards and young populations most discussed in psychological and psychiatric research. Using broad climate-hazard terminology and inclusive youth descriptors helped minimize the risk of missing relevant studies. The complete search strings for both databases, together with the database-specific query syntax and the exact search URLs, are also provided in the Supplementary Table S1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

A series of filters were applied to ensure that the corpus aligned with the intended scope of the study. The PRISMA flow diagram (Figure 1) reports the inclusion and exclusion criteria in detail, together with the number of records retained at each step in both databases.

Screening and selection process

The initial search retrieved 9,290 documents from Web of Science (WOS) and 15,255 from Scopus. After limiting the query to publication years 2000–2025, the numbers were reduced to 9,078 (WOS) and 14,467 (Scopus). Inclusion and exclusion criteria included series of additional filters for document type, language, and subject classification which produced 1,134 documents for Web of Science and 753 documents for Scopus.

Merging the Web of Science and Scopus records

To prepare a unified dataset for analysis, records from WoS and Scopus were converted into compatible formats and merged following established bibliometric procedures (Caputo and Kargina, 2022). The WoS records were exported in BibTeX (.bib) format, while the Scopus records were downloaded as a CSV file. Both files were imported into Biblioshiny, which converted them into standardized spreadsheet files, and the two datasets were then merged in Excel using the WoS file as the master structure. Duplicate entries were identified and removed on the basis of the Title, DOI, and Abstract fields. A step-by-step description of the database-merging procedure is provided in the Supplementary Table S2.

These merged 1,887 records were subjected to further screening. A total of 265 duplicates were removed, resulting in 1,622 unique documents. Title and abstract screening excluded 391 irrelevant documents. Further screening identified and removed one review book chapter, twelve article-type book chapters, and one proceedings paper. After applying all eligibility criteria, 1,217 documents were retained for bibliometric analysis. The complete list of the 1,217 included documents, with full bibliographic details, is provided as a separate online supplementary dataset (Supplementary Data Sheet 1).

Data analysis and software

The cleaned dataset was analyzed using Biblioshiny for RStudio (Version: 2025.09.2 + 418) (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017) and VOSviewer (Version 1.6.20) (van Eck and Waltman, 2010). Biblioshiny was used to extract descriptive indicators, annual publication trends, citation metrics, and author productivity patterns. VOSviewer was used to produce network visualizations for co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, citation networks, and co-citation clusters. The combined use of these tools supported both quantitative assessment and visual interpretation of the intellectual structure of the field. For the network analyses in VOSviewer, minimum-occurrence thresholds (five occurrences for keywords and five documents for countries) followed the software’s default settings, which balance comprehensiveness against the readability of the resulting maps (van Eck and Waltman, 2010). Country-level indicators were derived from the institutional affiliations of all listed authors; because internationally co-authored documents contribute to the counts of every country involved, country counts can exceed the number of unique documents and percentages can sum to more than 100. Affiliation-based counting also implies that research conducted on Global South populations by Global North-based teams is credited to the Global North, a point taken up in the Limitations.

The results are organized around the six objectives stated in the Introduction: the corpus overview and growth trajectory address Objective 1; the analyses of influential documents, sources, institutions, and countries address Objective 2; keyword and co-occurrence analyses map the thematic structure of the field (Objective 4); bibliographic coupling analyses examine international collaboration and its temporal evolution (Objectives 3 and 5); and geographic disparities in knowledge production (Objective 6) are traced throughout and synthesized in the Discussion.

Corpus overview and growth trajectory (Objective 1)

Between 2001 and 2025, a total of 1,217 documents (1,121 articles and 96 reviews) were identified from 517 sources, corresponding to an annual growth rate of 22.52% (Objective 1). The average document age is 3.55 years, and the average number of citations per document is 21.37; collectively, the documents cite 39,672 references. The dataset includes 2,409 Keywords Plus and 3,058 author keywords. In total, 4,192 authors contributed to the field; 209 documents were single-authored, written by 176 unique authors. The average number of co-authors per document is 3.88, and international co-authorship accounts for 18.73% of publications.

The number of publications remained low and stable between 2001 and 2010, with fewer than 10 documents per year (Figure 2). A gradual increase began after 2012, followed by a marked rise from 2019 onward. The highest growth occurred between 2021 and 2025, reaching 262 documents in 2025. The trend in average citations per year shows a different pattern. Citation impact peaked in 2012 with 11.46 citations per year and remained variable across the following years. Despite the growth in scientific output, the average citations per year declined after 2021, reflecting the recency of publications produced during the most rapid expansion of the field. The pronounced peak in average citations per year in 2012 is largely attributable to a small publication cohort that contained the field’s two most influential works, both authored by Ojala (see Table 1): because relatively few documents were published that year, two highly cited studies (512 and 199 global citations, respectively) were sufficient to raise the cohort mean far above every other year. More generally, the divergence between the two curves in Figure 2 reflects the mechanics of citation accumulation rather than a decline in quality or relevance: recently published documents have had little time to accrue citations, so mean citation rates for the 2022–2025 cohorts are necessarily compressed. The pattern also indicates that the field’s citation impact remains concentrated in a comparatively small set of canonical works published between 2012 and 2021, while the large volume of recent scholarship has yet to consolidate into new reference points.

Most influential documents (Objective 2)

To identify the most influential works in the corpus (Objective 2), documents were ranked by local citations (LC), that is, the number of citations a document received from other documents within the 1,217-document corpus. Local citations index a work’s influence on this specific field, whereas global citations (GC) count all citations recorded in the source databases across all fields. Table 1 lists the ten documents with the highest local-citation counts.

The most influential study in Table 1 is by Ojala (2012a), which examines the role of hope in shaping young people’s engagement with climate issues and has received 88 local citations. The systematic review by Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2020) follows with 85 local citations and highlights how children and youth are positioned within climate change education. Ojala’s second 2012 article (Ojala, 2012b) is also prominent, with 76 local citations, focusing on coping strategies and wellbeing. The study by O’Brien et al. (2018) on youth climate activism has 66 local citations. Another study, by Ojala and Bengtsson (2019), examines communication patterns and pro-environmental behavior and has 50 local citations. Hickman’s (2020) article on eco-anxiety has 46 local citations, while Jones and Davison’s (2021) work on emotional responses within education has 45. The scoping review by Léger-Goodes et al. (2022) examining eco-anxiety in children has 37 local citations. Stevenson et al. (2019) received 36 local citations for their study on social influences on adolescents’ climate concern. Wallis and Loy’s (2021) study on drivers of youth environmental activism also stands out with 36 local citations.

Geographic distribution of scientific production (Objectives 2 and 6)

Figure 3 presents the distribution of scientific production by country (Objectives 2 and 6). In the map (Figure 3A), darker shades of blue indicate greater production and grey indicates no recorded production. The United States has the highest number of publications (n = 740, equivalent to 60.8% of the corpus), followed by the United Kingdom (n = 396, 32.5%) and Australia (n = 351, 28.8%). Canada contributes 308 documents (25.3%), China 185 (15.2%), Germany 149 (12.2%), and Sweden 104 (8.5%), while Portugal, Spain, and Italy follow with 95, 89, and 83 documents, respectively (Figure 3B). At first glance, the map may suggest reasonably broad global coverage, because most continents record at least some production. The bar chart in Figure 3B, however, makes clear that the substantive inequality lies in volume rather than mere presence: the United States alone accounts for almost twice as many documents as the second-ranked country, and most climate-vulnerable countries appear only in the lightest map categories. Pakistan, for example—among the countries most severely affected by recent climate disasters (Anjum and Fraser, 2021)—accounts for 41 documents, equivalent to 3.4% of the corpus. Two features of these counts warrant emphasis. First, they are affiliation-based frequencies: internationally co-authored documents count towards every contributing country, so percentages do not sum to 100. Second, the counts capture where authors are institutionally based, not where study populations live; research conducted on Global South communities by Global North-based teams is credited to the Global North, so these figures, if anything, overstate Global South participation in knowledge production (see Limitations). The dominance of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia reflects their strong research capacity and sustained academic attention to climate change and youth mental health, linked to the concentration of research institutions, funding opportunities, and established scholarly networks in these countries.

Leading sources and institutions (Objective 2)

Table 2 reports the ten sources that have published most on this topic (Objective 2). Rather than restating the counts, we note what the distribution indicates about the structure of the field. The leading outlet, Environmental Education Research (n = 68), is a specialist environmental education journal, and education-oriented outlets more broadly (Environmental Education Research, the Journal of Environmental Education, and Education Sciences) together account for nearly one hundred documents—more than any single psychology journal in the list. A substantial share of psychological research on climate change and young people is thus framed and published as education research rather than as clinical or health research, which shapes the audiences that encounter this evidence. General sustainability and public health outlets (Sustainability; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health) and core environmental psychology journals (Journal of Environmental Psychology; Ecopsychology) account for much of the remainder. Children’s Geographies appears twice in Table 2 (n = 21 and n = 14) because of inconsistent source-name indexing in the databases; treated as a single journal, its combined 35 documents would place it fourth overall, underscoring the prominence of children’s geographies scholarship in this field. Finally, the relative scarcity of psychiatric and clinical child mental health journals among the top sources suggests that clinical research communities remain comparatively peripheral to this literature—a notable gap given the field’s emphasis on mental health outcomes.

Table 3 shows the distribution of the most relevant universities (Objective 2). North Carolina State University leads (n = 41), followed closely by Deakin University (n = 38) and the University of Melbourne (n = 37), with the remaining institutions contributing between 23 and 33 documents each. More telling than the individual counts is the pattern: all ten institutions are located in high-income countries—the United States, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada—so the institutional geography of the field mirrors the country-level inequalities shown in Figure 3, with no university from a climate-vulnerable or Global South country among the leading contributors.

Keyword frequencies and thematic clusters (Objective 4)

Figure 4 presents the distribution of the most frequently used author keywords (Objective 4). Because the corpus was retrieved with queries that combined climate-related and youth-related terms, the prominence of keywords such as “climate change” (n = 333), “youth” (n = 101), “children” (n = 86), and “adolescents” (n = 63) is expected by construction and is reported primarily as a check on the coherence of the corpus. More informative are the highest-frequency keywords that were not part of the search strategy: “mental health” (n = 78), “climate change education” (n = 72), “eco-anxiety” (n = 65), “climate anxiety” (n = 64), “environmental education” (n = 54), and “education” (n = 50). These terms show where the field concentrates conceptually—on educational responses and on the emotional and mental health dimensions of climate change—an emphasis examined more formally in the co-occurrence analysis below.

We used co-occurrence analysis to identify the main topics examined in studies on climate change and youth mental health. The minimum number of occurrences for a keyword was set to 5, following VOSviewer’s default threshold, which balances comprehensiveness against the readability of the resulting map (van Eck and Waltman, 2010). Out of 3,056 author keywords, 176 met this threshold. The network visualization generated from these terms is presented in Figure 5.

In the network visualization, the size of each bubble reflects the frequency of the keyword, with larger bubbles representing more commonly used terms. The colors indicate groups of keywords that appear together often and form distinct thematic clusters. These colors help illustrate how different topics are connected within the field. The lines linking the bubbles represent the strength of co-occurrence between keywords; thicker or denser lines indicate stronger associations. The central position of climate change shows that it is the most frequently studied concept and the main point around which other themes are organized. Because VOSviewer suppresses labels that would overlap, not every keyword is visible in the figure; the complete keyword membership of each cluster is reported in Supplementary Table S3.

Figure 5 shows that the field is organized around nine clusters, distinguished by colour in the network visualization. Supplementary Table S3 lists the complete keyword membership of each cluster; it reports the same co-occurrence solution as Figure 5 in tabular form rather than a separate analysis. In the description that follows, clusters are numbered by size (Cluster 1 being the largest) and identified by the colour in which they appear in Figure 5. Cluster 1 (red, 38 keywords) groups psychological responses with the mental-health impacts of disasters, connecting terms such as anxiety, depression, mental health, stress, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, disasters, flooding, resilience, and children. Cluster 2 (green, 27 keywords) brings together climate-change education, activism, and civic participation, including education for sustainable development, learning, activism, climate activism, climate justice, collective action, Fridays for Future, and political participation. Cluster 3 (blue, 23 keywords) is anchored by the central node climate change and links it to pro-environmental behavior, attitudes, and school-based or participatory learning (for example, climate change education, education, students, high school, attitudes, environmental concern, photovoice, and participatory action research). Cluster 4 (yellow, 21 keywords) captures climate emotions and their measurement (for example, climate change anxiety, climate emotions, climate change awareness, worry, concern, coping, survey, and scale). Cluster 5 (purple, 21 keywords) covers the social, cultural, and early-childhood dimensions of the field (for example, Africa, culture, identity, family, early childhood education, environmental education, self-efficacy, and solastalgia). Cluster 6 (cyan, 15 keywords) centres on environmental activism and justice (for example, environmentalism, environmental activism, environmental justice, civic engagement, youth activism, and teachers). Cluster 7 (orange, 15 keywords) gathers eco-anxiety, distress, and wellbeing (for example, eco-anxiety, climate anxiety, climate distress, ecopsychology, youth mental health, wellbeing, and nature). Cluster 8 (brown, 10 keywords) concerns adolescent health and longitudinal or behavioral-theory studies (for example, adolescence, adolescent health, health, longitudinal, environmental attitudes, and theory of planned behavior). The smallest cluster, Cluster 9 (pink, 6 keywords), groups affect, emotion, and public health (affect, emotion, climate crisis, global warming, public health, and review).

Together, these clusters illustrate the range of themes that structure the literature on how children and adolescents understand, experience, and respond to climate change: psychological responses and disaster-related mental health impacts, educational practices, climate emotions and pro-environmental behavior, activism and climate justice, youth development, and public health. Notably, the clusters centred on individual emotional responses, education, and behavior are larger and denser than those addressing structural and justice-oriented themes, an asymmetry examined further in the Discussion.

International collaboration and its temporal evolution (Objectives 3 and 5)

We used bibliographic coupling to examine collaboration patterns among countries (Objective 3). The minimum threshold was set at 5 documents per country, consistent with the keyword analysis and the software’s default settings (see Methods). The initial dataset included 1,106 country entries, but several duplicates and inconsistently labeled country names were identified. After cleaning the data and removing invalid entries using the thesaurus file, 1,084 records remained. Of these, 45 countries met the minimum requirement of 5 documents. The resulting network is shown in Figure 6. The size of the bubbles reflects the number of publications produced by each country, and the colors indicate clusters of countries that frequently appear together through shared references. The lines connecting the bubbles represent the strength of their coupling relationships. Figure 6 shows that the United States, Australia, Canada, and several European countries form the central group with the strongest coupling links, indicating high levels of shared references and overlapping research interests. Countries in Asia, Africa, and South America also appear in the network but with fewer connections, reflecting more limited engagement in cross-referenced research within this field.

The colour of the bubbles in Figure 7 indicates the average publication year of each country’s coupled documents (Objective 5), as shown in the colour-bar legend: purple indicates output concentrated around 2021, green around 2022, and yellow in 2023 and beyond. Several climate-vulnerable and Global South countries (e.g., Ghana, Ethiopia, Chile, and Bangladesh) appear in yellow, indicating that their output in this field is concentrated in the most recent years, whereas the highest-volume producers (e.g., the United States, Canada, and Australia) show earlier average publication years. This temporal patterning suggests that a geographic broadening of the research base, although still limited in volume, has begun in the most recent years.

This bibliometric analysis reveals the intellectual structure, thematic evolution, and collaborative networks within research on climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing from 2001 to 2025. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic mapping of this research domain conducted explicitly through a climate justice lens; it contributes to the literature by tracing the field’s growth, identifying its dominant thematic clusters and influential sources, exposing geographic imbalances in knowledge production, and deriving practical implications for researchers, practitioners, funders, and editors seeking to build a more epistemically just evidence base. The findings illuminate not only the rapid expansion of this field but also profound geographic inequalities in knowledge production that raise critical questions of climate justice and epistemic equity. By analyzing 1,217 documents from 517 sources authored by 4,192 researchers across 45 countries, this study exposes patterns of research concentration that reflect and potentially perpetuate structural inequalities in whose children’s climate experiences are studied, whose voices are heard in academic discourse, and which epistemologies shape understanding of climate-related psychological impacts on youth globally.

Explosive growth and temporal dynamics of the field

The field’s explosive growth, with an annual growth rate of 22.52% and publications surging from fewer than 10 per year before 2010 to 262 in 2025, reflects escalating recognition of climate change as a critical threat to children’s mental health. This temporal pattern reveals three distinct phases of field development. The first phase (2001–2014) represents a foundational period of minimal scholarly attention, with research remaining sparse and scattered. The second phase (2015–2019) marks an awakening period characterized by gradual but steady growth coinciding with the 2015 Paris Agreement, which catalyzed global attention to climate impacts on vulnerable populations including children (Clayton et al., 2021; Pörtner et al., 2022). The third phase (2020–2025) represents exponential expansion driven by converging factors including the COVID-19 pandemic’s amplification of mental health awareness, the rise of youth climate movements such as Fridays for Future that brought youth voices to global prominence, and accumulating evidence of severe climate impacts worldwide (Hickman et al., 2021; Wallis and Loy, 2021).

However, this rapid expansion must be critically examined through a climate justice lens. The sharp growth in research occurred predominantly in Global North institutions during a period when Global South nations experienced some of the most devastating climate impacts. For instance, the 2022 Pakistan floods displaced 8 million people, yet Pakistan contributes only 41 publications to this corpus compared to the United States’ 740. Similarly, nations in Sub-Saharan Africa—experiencing unprecedented droughts, food insecurity, and climate-driven displacement affecting millions of children—remain nearly absent from this knowledge base (Al-Zu’bi et al., 2022). This temporal-geographic disconnect reveals that research growth reflects not the distribution of climate harms but rather the concentration of research capacity, funding structures, and academic infrastructure in wealthy nations that bear greatest historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions while experiencing relatively buffered climate impacts (Sultana, 2025). The 92% of excess global carbon emissions attributable to the Global North contrasts starkly with research contribution patterns, highlighting a profound injustice wherein those most responsible for the climate crisis dominate discourse about its psychological impacts while those most affected remain marginalized in knowledge production (Hickel, 2020; Sultana, 2025).

Geographic inequalities and epistemic injustice in knowledge production

The geographic distribution of research production exposes stark inequalities that constitute epistemic injustice in climate psychology scholarship. The United States alone accounts for 740 publications (60.8% of the corpus), followed by the United Kingdom with 396 (32.5%) and Australia with 351 (28.8%). These three anglophone, Global North nations collectively dominate the field despite representing a tiny fraction of the world’s children and experiencing relatively modest climate impacts compared to vulnerable regions. Canada, Germany, and Sweden—all high-income nations with robust social safety nets and climate adaptation capacity—contribute substantially more research than entire continents most affected by climate change. In contrast, Asia, Africa, and South America—home to the majority of the world’s children and experiencing disproportionate climate impacts—appear in the collaboration network with markedly limited engagement.

This pattern constitutes epistemic injustice, defined as the unfair treatment in knowledge-related practices wherein voices, experiences, and problems of marginalized individuals and communities are not taken seriously (Fricker, 2007; Sultana, 2025). The marginalization of Global South scholars and perspectives in climate psychology research reflects broader structures of epistemic coloniality—the continuation of colonial power relations through knowledge production systems that privilege Western epistemologies while marginalizing alternative ways of knowing (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Reddy et al., 2021; Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2017). Small Island Developing States facing existential threats from sea-level rise, Sub-Saharan African nations experiencing climate-driven food insecurity affecting children’s development, and South Asian countries confronting extreme heat stress in densely populated regions remain systematically underrepresented despite bearing disproportionate climate burdens (Al-Zu’bi et al., 2022; Anjum and Aziz, 2025).

The concentration of research in institutions such as North Carolina State University (41 publications), Deakin University (38), and the University of Melbourne (37)—all located in wealthy anglophone nations—further reinforces this pattern. These geographic disparities in knowledge production are not merely academic statistics; they have profound implications for climate justice. As Sultana (2025) argues, epistemic injustices in climate research perpetuate material inequalities by shaping whose experiences inform policy, whose solutions are considered legitimate, and whose children’s psychological needs receive attention and resources. When research agendas are set primarily by Global North institutions studying their own relatively privileged populations, the field risks producing knowledge systems that universalize Western, individualistic, middle-class experiences while rendering invisible the structural violence, collective trauma, and community-rooted resilience characterizing children’s climate experiences in the Global South (Aziz and Anjum, 2025).

Multiple structural barriers perpetuate these disparities. Global South researchers face substantial obstacles including language barriers (with English-language publication requirements excluding scholarship in other languages), funding limitations that prevent costly international collaborations, institutional resource constraints limiting research capacity, and reviewer gatekeeping in international journals that may devalue non-Western methodologies and epistemologies (Bera et al., 2024; Overland et al., 2022; Rucavado Rojas and Postigo, 2025). Funding patterns illustrate this asymmetry starkly: of the global funding for climate research on Africa, the overwhelming majority flows to institutions in Europe and North America rather than to African institutions (Overland et al., 2022). The practice of “parachute science”—wherein Global North researchers extract data from Global South contexts without meaningful collaboration or capacity building—further entrenches epistemic inequalities (David-Chavez and Gavin, 2018; Enokenwa Baa, 2021); in climate research drawing on Indigenous knowledge, a global assessment found that roughly 87% of studies followed extractive practices, with minimal Indigenous participation in design or interpretation (David-Chavez and Gavin, 2018). Publication costs, conference attendance expenses, and subscription paywalls create additional barriers that systematically exclude Global South scholars from participating in and shaping international discourse on climate psychology (Bera et al., 2024).

Thematic clusters and the politics of research focus

The nine thematic clusters identified through keyword co-occurrence analysis reveal not only what has been studied but what epistemological frameworks and conceptual priorities dominate the field. The prominence of eco-anxiety (65 occurrences) and climate anxiety (64 occurrences) as major research foci reflects Western psychological frameworks that emphasize individual emotional responses and cognitive processes. While this research has generated important insights into climate-related psychological distress, its dominance may reflect cultural assumptions about the primacy of individual experience over collective trauma, structural violence, and community-level impacts more salient in non-Western contexts (Aziz and Anjum, 2025). Cross-national evidence complicates any simple reading of climate anxiety as an exclusively Western phenomenon: in the largest survey to date, respondents in the Philippines, India, Nigeria, and Brazil reported among the highest levels of climate-related distress (Hickman et al., 2021), and a 32-country study documented negative climate emotions across widely differing cultural and economic contexts (Ogunbode et al., 2022; see also Tam et al., 2023). What is Western-centred, therefore, is less the emotional experience itself than the conceptual and measurement apparatus through which the field studies it—individual-level anxiety constructs and self-report instruments developed and validated on predominantly Western samples (Clayton and Karazsia, 2020; Henrich et al., 2010).

The strong emphasis on climate change education (72 occurrences), environmental education (54 occurrences), and pro-environmental behavior (48 occurrences) similarly reflects Western paradigms that center individual behavior change and information-deficit models. These approaches, while valuable, often assume that cognitive understanding and personal action constitute primary pathways to addressing climate change—an assumption that may overlook structural inequalities, systemic barriers, and the importance of collective mobilization more emphasized in Global South contexts (Aziz and Anjum, 2025). Western psychology-based campaigns frequently urge individuals to recycle, consume less, or drive less, assuming information deficits or cognitive biases as main barriers. However, in many non-Western communities facing structural marginalization, climate justice, collective action, and challenging power structures may be more salient frameworks for understanding and responding to climate change (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Oladejo et al., 2023).

Notably, while clusters addressing youth activism (31 occurrences), climate justice, and environmental justice appear in the network, they remain less developed compared to individualistic psychological constructs. This pattern suggests that structural approaches emphasizing power relations, historical responsibility, and systemic change receive less scholarly attention than individualized emotional and behavioral frameworks. The relative absence of keywords related to colonialism, structural violence, displacement, or climate-induced migration—despite these phenomena profoundly affecting millions of children globally—further reveals epistemic gaps shaped by researcher positionality and institutional priorities (Sultana, 2025).

A related question concerns what the scholarship that does emerge from or about non-Western contexts focuses on. Although a full content analysis of the corpus is beyond the scope of a bibliometric study, the network structure offers indicative evidence: the disaster-focused cluster (red in Figure 5)—flooding, disasters, PTSD, depression, and resilience—is where climate-vulnerable regions are most visible, consistent with a literature in which Global South childhoods enter the record primarily through acute disaster exposure rather than through anticipatory emotions such as eco-anxiety. Reviews of Indigenous mental health and climate change similarly find that the published evidence clusters around land-based loss, displacement, and disrupted cultural continuity rather than individually framed climate anxiety, and that this evidence is itself geographically skewed towards the Circumpolar North (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018; Middleton et al., 2020). A systematic coding of study populations, methods, and constructs by region—distinguishing, for example, community-based qualitative studies from survey-based designs—would test these patterns directly and is identified as a priority in Future Directions.

The co-occurrence structure, in which core constructs such as anxiety, mental health, and depression are central to the network yet not organized by a dominant, well-established theoretical framework, suggests the field remains in early formation. This presents both challenges and opportunities. The challenge lies in developing robust conceptual models to guide research and intervention. The opportunity resides in the potential to intentionally build theoretical foundations that center climate justice, incorporate diverse epistemologies, and privilege marginalized perspectives rather than defaulting to Western psychological paradigms (Reddy et al., 2021; Sultana, 2025).

Influential literature and citation networks

The most locally cited works reveal which scholarship has shaped the field’s intellectual development. Ojala’s research on hope and youth climate engagement (Ojala, 2012a; 88 local citations) and coping strategies (Ojala, 2012b; 76 local citations) established foundational concepts emphasizing youth agency and psychological resilience. Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles’ (2020) systematic review on children’s voice in climate education (85 local citations) advanced participatory approaches. These influential works predominantly emanate from Global North contexts—Sweden, Australia, United Kingdom—and primarily study Western populations. While methodologically rigorous and conceptually valuable, their dominance in citation networks shapes what theories, methodologies, and findings are considered canonical, potentially marginalizing alternative frameworks and insights from Global South contexts (Anjum and Aziz, 2025).

The journals publishing this research—Environmental Education Research (68 publications), Sustainability (58), Frontiers in Psychology (37), and Journal of Environmental Psychology (34)—are predominantly based in and edited by scholars from the Global North. While these outlets maintain rigorous peer review standards, editorial board composition, reviewer selection, and conceptual frameworks privileged in these journals may inadvertently reinforce epistemic hierarchies that favor Western methodologies and theoretical approaches (Rucavado Rojas and Postigo, 2025). Global South scholars report experiencing longer review times, higher rejection rates, and gatekeeping that questions the legitimacy of non-Western epistemologies or community-based methodologies (Enokenwa Baa, 2021).

Collaboration patterns and research networks

The bibliographic coupling analysis revealing that the United States, Australia, Canada, and European countries form the central collaboration network with strongest coupling links while Asia, Africa, and South America appear with limited connections illuminates inequitable research partnerships. International co-authorship, while present at 18.73%, appears concentrated among Global North nations rather than representing genuine North–South collaboration. This pattern reflects structural barriers including funding mechanisms that favor Global North institutions, visa restrictions limiting scholar mobility from the Global South, language barriers, and unequal power dynamics in collaborative arrangements (Bera et al., 2024).

True collaboration requires moving beyond tokenistic inclusion toward meaningful partnerships that center Global South leadership, respect diverse epistemologies, invest in capacity building, and ensure equitable authorship and credit allocation (Sultana, 2025). The current pattern wherein Global South contexts serve as data collection sites for Global North-led research while Global South scholars remain junior partners or excluded altogether perpetuates colonial knowledge extraction practices (Enokenwa Baa, 2021). As articulated by World Climate Research Program discussions, collaboration is important but insufficient; autonomy in climate research whereby communities most impacted by climate change define and prioritize their own research agendas is essential for epistemic justice (Lamptey et al., 2024; Mishra et al., 2023).

Implications for understanding children’s climate experiences globally

These findings have profound implications for understanding children’s psychological experiences of climate change globally. The current knowledge base, dominated by research on relatively privileged populations in nations with robust social safety nets and climate adaptation capacity, risks universalizing Western, middle-class experiences while obscuring the lived realities of the majority of the world’s children. Children in the Global South experience climate change not merely as eco-anxiety or climate worry but as immediate threats to survival—food insecurity threatening development, displacement destroying community bonds, heat stress impairing learning, and climate-driven resource conflicts generating violence and trauma (Pörtner et al., 2022).

The psychological impacts of climate change intersect profoundly with structural violence, poverty, colonialism, racism, and historical marginalization in ways that Western psychological frameworks may inadequately capture (Oladejo et al., 2023; Sultana, 2025). Indigenous children experiencing climate-driven loss of ancestral lands face not only ecological displacement but profound cultural trauma and identity disruption rooted in relational ontologies wherein land, community, and identity are inseparable (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Billiot et al., 2019a; Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018; Whyte, 2017). Work by Indigenous scholars shows how repeated disasters and chronic environmental change also disrupt the generational transmission of Indigenous knowledge itself, compounding the developmental consequences for children and youth (Billiot et al., 2019b). Children in climate-vulnerable nations witnessing governmental and international inaction on adaptation experience betrayal and abandonment shaped by colonial legacies of exploitation and contemporary global power asymmetries (Hickman et al., 2021; Sultana, 2025). These experiences demand theoretical frameworks attending to structural violence, colonial trauma, and collective resilience rather than only individual emotional responses.

Moreover, the current knowledge base may overlook community-rooted coping mechanisms, Indigenous knowledge systems, and collective healing practices that sustain psychological wellbeing in Global South contexts. By centering Western individualistic frameworks, the field risks pathologizing responses that may be culturally adaptive, overlooking strengths-based approaches grounded in community solidarity, and proposing interventions misaligned with local values and practices (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Reddy et al., 2021). For instance, Western psychology often conceptualizes human-nature relationships through anthropocentric frameworks treating the environment as external resource, whereas many Indigenous and non-Western worldviews emphasize reciprocal, kinship-based relationships with the natural world—fundamentally different ontologies with implications for understanding climate distress and resilience (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018; McGregor et al., 2020; Whyte, 2017).

Implications for policy, practice, and intervention development

The epistemic inequalities revealed by this analysis carry serious implications for policy and practice. When knowledge production concentrates in the Global North, resulting evidence bases inform interventions, clinical guidelines, and policy recommendations potentially misaligned with Global South realities. Mental health interventions for climate-affected children developed and tested primarily in Western contexts may prove ineffective or inappropriate when exported to communities with different cultural values, resource constraints, and structural challenges (Aziz and Anjum, 2025). Educational approaches emphasizing individual behavior change may neglect structural barriers that limit agency among marginalized populations. Policy recommendations based on research with relatively privileged populations may fail to address the urgent needs of children facing climate-driven displacement, food insecurity, or violence.

Furthermore, the concentration of research in Global North institutions shapes international funding priorities, policy agendas, and which populations receive attention and resources. International organizations, donors, and policymakers rely on published evidence to guide resource allocation. When that evidence base systematically underrepresents or excludes Global South children’s experiences, resource distribution may reinforce rather than remediate existing inequalities (Sultana, 2025). The relative abundance of research on eco-anxiety among privileged youth compared to research on climate-driven malnutrition, displacement trauma, or conflict-related psychological impacts among marginalized populations reflects not the relative importance of these issues but the geographic and political economy of knowledge production.

Importantly, addressing children’s climate-related psychological wellbeing requires not only mental health interventions but structural changes addressing root causes—greenhouse gas mitigation, climate adaptation investment, debt relief for climate-vulnerable nations, and redistribution of climate finance from high-emitting nations to affected communities (Hickel, 2020; Sultana, 2025). Research dominated by individualistic psychological frameworks may inadvertently depoliticize climate impacts by framing them as personal emotional challenges requiring therapeutic intervention rather than symptoms of structural violence requiring political transformation (Oladejo et al., 2023). A climate justice approach recognizes that children’s psychological wellbeing depends fundamentally on addressing the systemic inequalities, colonial legacies, and power asymmetries that concentrate climate harms on already marginalized populations.

Pathways toward epistemic justice and decolonized climate psychology

Addressing the epistemic injustices revealed by this analysis requires systemic transformation across multiple levels. At the funding level, international agencies and national research councils must intentionally direct resources to Global South institutions, support South–South collaborations, and require equitable partnerships wherein Global South researchers hold leadership roles rather than serving as data collectors for Global North-led projects (Aziz and Anjum, 2024; Bera et al., 2024; Sultana, 2025). Funding mechanisms should support research in languages beyond English, value community-based participatory methodologies, and recognize diverse forms of knowledge production beyond conventional academic outputs.

At the journal and editorial level, climate psychology outlets must diversify editorial boards to include substantial Global South representation, implement policies actively recruiting manuscripts from underrepresented regions, provide reviewer training on recognizing and valuing diverse epistemologies, and consider multilingual publication or translation support (Bera et al., 2024; Pezzullo, 2024). Several journals have begun implementing such changes—Environmental Communication recruiting regional editors from Africa, the Middle East, and Indigenous nations; Frontiers reducing publication fees and expanding waivers for Global South scholars—providing models for broader transformation (Bera et al., 2024; Pezzullo, 2024).

At the research level, scholars must commit to genuinely collaborative practices that center Global South leadership, respect Indigenous data sovereignty, engage communities as co-investigators rather than research subjects, and ensure research benefits flow to participating communities rather than solely advancing academic careers (Sultana, 2025). Methodologically, the field must move beyond valorizing only quantitative, positivist approaches to embrace diverse methods including storytelling, participatory action research, Indigenous methodologies, and arts-based approaches that may better capture collective experiences and honor non-Western epistemologies (Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Trott, 2024). Photovoice, for example, has been used to document Indigenous accounts of environmental change and injustice in ways that keep interpretive authority within communities (Mitchell et al., 2020).

Theoretically, decolonizing climate psychology requires critically examining Western assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks—individualism, anthropocentrism, mind–body dualism, nature-culture binaries—and opening space for alternative ontologies and epistemologies (Adams et al., 2015; Aziz and Anjum, 2025; Reddy et al., 2021). This includes learning from Indigenous psychologies that emphasize relationality, reciprocity, and interconnection; engaging with Global South theoretical traditions addressing structural violence, colonialism, and collective trauma; and developing new conceptual frameworks that attend to climate justice, power relations, and systemic inequalities rather than only individual emotional responses (McGregor et al., 2020; Oladejo et al., 2023; Sultana, 2025; Whyte, 2017).

Importantly, as articulated by Global South and Indigenous scholars, genuine transformation requires not merely including marginalized voices within existing structures but fundamentally restructuring knowledge production systems, redistributing resources and decision-making power, acknowledging historical harms, and committing to reparative justice (Reddy et al., 2021; Sultana, 2025; Tuck and Yang, 2012). As Tuck and Yang (2012) caution, decolonization that remains metaphorical—adopting the language of diversity without redistributing resources and authority—leaves colonial structures intact. This demands uncomfortable conversations about complicity, privilege, and the ongoing colonial dimensions of academic knowledge production. It requires Global North researchers to relinquish epistemic authority, share resources, amplify marginalized voices, and accept that authentic decolonization means loss of dominance rather than additive diversity (Sultana, 2025).

Strengths and limitations

This study’s strengths include its comprehensive scope analyzing over 1,200 documents from multiple databases, rigorous methodology combining bibliometric and visualization techniques, and critical climate justice framework that moves beyond descriptive mapping to interrogate power relations in knowledge production. However, several limitations warrant acknowledgment. The reliance on Web of Science and Scopus databases, while standard in bibliometric research, inherently privileges English-language publications indexed in predominantly Western databases, potentially excluding substantial bodies of scholarship published in other languages or regional outlets (Bera et al., 2024; Pasgaard et al., 2015). Grey literature, community reports, and non-academic knowledge production remain outside the scope of this analysis yet may represent important contributions particularly from Global South contexts.

The keyword-based search strategy, while comprehensive, may miss relevant research using different terminological frameworks. For instance, scholarship addressing children’s experiences of climate impacts may not explicitly use terms like “climate change” or “psychological wellbeing” but frame issues through concepts of environmental justice, displacement trauma, or community resilience. The restriction to psychology, social psychology, and psychiatry journals excludes potentially relevant research published in anthropology, development studies, or interdisciplinary outlets. This scoping decision, motivated by our focus on psychological outcomes (see Methods), means the analysis maps the psychological literature specifically rather than the entirety of research on climate change and young people. These methodological choices, while necessary for analytical feasibility, mean the analysis presents an incomplete picture of global knowledge production about children’s climate-related psychological experiences.

Additionally, bibliometric analysis examines formal publications but cannot capture whose research receives funding, whose studies get rejected, whose voices are silenced before reaching publication, or whose knowledge contributions occur outside academic contexts. The analysis reveals what has been published but not what has been systematically excluded—a limitation particularly significant given documented barriers Global South scholars face in publication pipelines (Rucavado Rojas and Postigo, 2025). Country attribution based on institutional affiliations may not reflect researcher nationality or ethnic identity, potentially obscuring diaspora scholars or patterns of knowledge extraction wherein Global North institutions extract data from Global South contexts (David-Chavez and Gavin, 2018). Relatedly, affiliation-based country counts capture where authors work rather than where study populations live: a study of children in Bangladesh conducted entirely by European-based authors is credited to Europe. Disentangling author affiliation from sample location—and identifying how often Global South populations are studied without Global South authorship—would require document-level coding of study sites and is an important extension of this work.

Future directions

Future research should examine geographic patterns within regions—for instance, which African countries contribute research and which remain absent, potentially revealing intra-regional inequalities shaped by colonial histories and current economic disparities. Analyses of authorship sequences could illuminate power dynamics within international collaborations, revealing whether Global South scholars occupy first or senior author positions indicating intellectual leadership or junior positions suggesting exploitative arrangements. Examining gender, race, and other identity dimensions within author networks would further reveal intersecting inequalities shaping knowledge production. Coding the included studies by methodology (qualitative, quantitative, mixed, or participatory) and by sample location as distinct from author affiliation would answer two questions the present analysis cannot: whether the qualitative and community-based approaches best suited to capturing collective and culturally specific climate experiences are underrepresented, and how much of the Global South-focused literature is produced without Global South leadership.

Qualitative research interviewing Global South scholars about their experiences attempting to publish climate psychology research could illuminate specific barriers and potential solutions. Comparative analyses examining how children’s climate experiences are theorized and researched differently across geographic contexts could reveal epistemological diversity and identify opportunities for cross-pollination. Importantly, future work should extend beyond critique toward actively building alternative models—documenting successful South–South collaborations, highlighting exemplary equitable partnerships, and developing practical toolkits for decolonizing climate psychology research practice.

Longitudinal tracking of these bibliometric patterns over time could assess whether interventions aimed at increasing equity—diversified editorial boards, reduced publication fees, targeted funding—produce measurable changes in geographic representation. Such accountability metrics could guide ongoing efforts toward epistemic justice in climate psychology scholarship.

This bibliometric analysis reveals that research on climate change and children’s psychological wellbeing, while growing explosively, exhibits profound geographic inequalities that constitute epistemic injustice. The concentration of research production in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia—nations contributing disproportionately to greenhouse gas emissions while experiencing relatively buffered climate impacts—stands in stark contrast to the near-absence of scholarship from Small Island Developing States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and other climate-vulnerable regions home to millions of children experiencing severe climate harms. This pattern reflects not the distribution of climate impacts but rather structures of epistemic coloniality that privilege Global North perspectives, marginalize diverse epistemologies, and perpetuate knowledge systems that may inadequately represent the lived experiences of the majority of the world’s climate-affected children.

Addressing these inequalities requires systemic transformation—redirecting research funding to Global South institutions, diversifying editorial boards and reviewer pools, valuing diverse methodologies and epistemologies, ensuring genuine collaboration with equitable partnerships, and fundamentally decolonizing the theoretical frameworks dominating climate psychology. Such transformation is not merely a matter of academic fairness but a climate justice imperative. Children’s psychological wellbeing in the climate crisis depends on knowledge systems that honor diverse experiences, center marginalized voices, and inform interventions and policies responsive to the structural realities shaping climate vulnerability. Only by confronting and dismantling epistemic injustices can climate psychology fulfill its potential to support all the world’s children facing an uncertain climate future.