India, March 31 -- A groundbreaking study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 found that almost 60% of young people in ten countries were "very worried" about the climate crisis, and 45% said their anxiety got in the way of their daily lives. Alarmism, which was once mocked, is now a term used in public health. People no longer think of eco-anxiety as a rare mental illness. It is a feeling that comes from a structural crisis.

But in India and most of the Global South, fear of the environment goes beyond melting ice caps and far-off wildfires. It is about heat waves that make schools close, floods that kill small businesses, air pollution that makes it hard to breathe during the season, and the quiet fear that policy moves sl...