Charles Rotter
A paper in Frontiers in Psychology, published November 10 as COP31 opened in Turkey, wants to explain why climate distress sometimes turns people into greener shoppers and sometimes into impulse buyers. The authors, Özgür Çengel, Munise Hayrun Sağlam and Elif Türk, work at universities in Istanbul. Before anyone ticks a box about shopping, the introduction and the theoretical and literature sections that follow almost read like reciting the plagues of Egypt.
Climate change is no longer an abstract scenario. It unfolds every day, in blazing summers, silent forests, and vanishing coastlines, shaping how people feel, think, and consume (Clayton and Karazsia, 2020; Hickman et al., 2021).
The first three arrive in a single sentence: blazing summers, silent forests, vanishing coastlines, unfolding every day. The two citations are not studies of summers, forests or shores. Clayton and Karazsia (2020) is a paper that develops a questionnaire for climate-change anxiety. Hickman et al. (2021)00278-3/fulltext) is a Lancet Planetary Health survey of 10,000 young people about how they felt about climate change and their governments. Neither one measured a coastline or counted a tree. The plagues are announced, and the evidence is a feelings survey citing another feelings survey.
Read on and they keep coming. There is “distress about climate threats.” There is “sorrow over experienced or anticipated losses of valued species, ecosystems, and landscapes.” There is “a profound emotional distress that stems from witnessing the deterioration of cherished local environments,” and then this:
As places become degraded beyond recognition, individuals experience not only anxiety and grief but a profound sense of helplessness and loss of identity (Leviston et al., 2023).
If you number them off, you get a decent recitation. One, blazing summers. Two, silent forests. Three, vanishing coastlines. Four, lost species. Five, lost ecosystems. Six, lost landscapes. Seven, local places degraded beyond recognition. Eight, a loss of identity. Nine, anticipated future losses of “valued nature,” including grief that “may also become debilitating.” Ten, before a single Turkish shopper has been asked a question, Australian bushfire survivors, invoked so that solastalgia can be associated with a stronger sense of lost control. The paper leans on this dread far more than on any evidence that the disasters happened as described, or that they happened in Turkey.
The forests, for a start, have not gone silent, least of all in the country under study. The FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 puts world forest area at 4.14 billion hectares, about a third of the land surface. Net forest loss has slowed from 10.7 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 4.12 million hectares a year in 2015–2025. That is still a loss, and it is concentrated in the tropics, but it is not a daily vanishing of the world’s woods. FAOSTAT land-use data put forest land in Turkey itself at 19.8 million hectares in 1990 and 22.8 million hectares in 2025. The silent-forest plague is being recited in a country whose official FAO forest area has been rising for 35 years.
Coastlines are not vanishing every day either. NOAA puts the rise in global average sea level at 21 to 24 centimetres since 1880, and the recent satellite-era rate at about 4.5 millimetres a year by 2024. A few millimetres a year is a real change, and a long way from a coastline disappearing before breakfast. As for blazing summers, Turkey’s State Meteorological Service recorded a hot July in 2025, 1.9 °C above the 1991–2020 normal, which is a warm month, not summers unfolding in flames every day, and the authors still did not bother to cite a temperature record.
Later, almost in passing, the paper admits that its own solastalgia questions “do not independently verify environmental damage or establish that these changes are attributable to climate change.” The opening chapters are less shy, having already handed the reader the plagues before actually presenting their method and data.
The authors emailed adult consumers in Turkey in September 2025 and kept 582 completed surveys after dropping inattentive answers. Everyone rated statements about climate-change anxiety, eco-grief, solastalgia, moral disengagement, moral obligation, impulsive buying and eco-conscious behaviour on a seven-point scale, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The eco-conscious items, the paper says, “do not record specific purchasing events.” The impulse-buying items are about urges and excitement, not about whether the thing bought was harmful. The solastalgia items ask about worry and sadness over local change, without checking that the change happened or that climate caused it. The average scores sit around the middle of the scale: 3.59 for climate-change anxiety, 3.54 for solastalgia, 3.74 for eco-grief, on a scale that runs to 7. These people were not reporting anguish, just hovering near “neither agree nor disagree,” and that is the raw material for the science that follows.
Those mid-scale guesses were then put through partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, with 5,000 bootstrap resamples. In plain language, a computer was asked to draw a network of arrows among answers that 582 people gave, on the same form, about their own feelings, then to shuffle and redraw that same pile of answers 5,000 times so the arrows could be printed with impressively narrow confidence intervals. Nothing in that procedure measures a purchase, a forest or a degree of temperature. It is precise machinery pointed at “how did that make you feel, from 1 to 7,” run 5,000 times over the same homework, and all it produces is more decimal places on the same feelings.
All 12 of the paper’s hypotheses were supported. When does that happen in real science? Climate-change anxiety was positively associated both with moral obligation (β = 0.357) and with moral disengagement (β = 0.654). The same reported anxiety predicted a stronger felt duty to do the right thing and a stronger willingness to excuse doing the opposite. A model that can give you more virtue and more excuses out of the same answer can explain any outcome you like. Eco-grief pointed the other way, toward more obligation and less disengagement. Moral disengagement was associated with more impulse buying, and moral obligation with more eco-conscious behaviour. Solastalgia, the place-based distress, made the anxiety-to-disengagement path a bit stronger and the grief-to-obligation path a bit weaker. Late in the paper the authors concede that the design is cross-sectional, that the indirect effects “do not establish causal mediation,” and that common-method bias remains possible. They still dress the whole set of arrows as a “dual-route framework” in which feelings are routed through morals into shopping.
A month later they interviewed 26 people, chosen from volunteers who already scored at least 4 out of 7 on climate concern and who made at least one online purchase a week. From that hand-picked group of worried, frequent online shoppers come the lines that will be quoted. One participant, offered shoes described as climate-neutral, said, “If the site says the shoes are climate-neutral, I add a second pair. It’s like a two-for-one on virtue.” Another theme, which the authors label “last-chance hedonism,” includes “If coral reefs are dying, I want to see them while they are still there,” and “Heatwaves every summer mean terrace cafés will not be fun forever. I’d rather splurge on nights out than save for a future that might be 45 °C.” Those are colourful remarks, not a measurement of reefs, cafés or the Turkish climate, and they arrived after the statistical model had already confirmed every one of its 12 predictions.
The paper is open access under CC BY.
If the forests in Turkey have been growing for 35 years, what exactly was vanishing every day?
=====
Çengel, Sağlam and Türk, “Climate distress at a moral crossroads: how solastalgia conditions divergent consumer responses,” Frontiers in Psychology 17:1973974 (10 November 2026), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1973974, used under CC BY 4.0.
