Insight : International Journal of social research
Vol. 3 No. 5 (2025): Insight : International Journal of Social Research

Climate Change and Eco-Anxiety in Contemporary Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi)

Nur Affah Al Akromi, Elok (Unknown)
Miakhil, Jan Mohammad (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
28 Oct 2025

Abstract

Climate change has precipitated not only an ecological crisis but a profound psychological one, giving rise to eco-anxiety a chronic, multidimensional emotional response to environmental degradation that is increasingly prevalent across global populations. Despite the parallel growth of climate fiction (cli-fi) as a culturally significant literary genre, scholarship has yet to systematically examine how contemporary cli-fi represents eco-anxiety as both thematic content and formal principle. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative ecocritical and affective literary analysis of six internationally significant cli-fi novels: Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012), Powers' The Overstory (2018), El Akkad's American War (2017), Jemisin's The Fifth Season (2015), Offill's Weather (2020), and Ghosh's Gun Island (2019). Employing thematic analysis supported by NVivo (Version 14) and guided by an ecocritical coding rubric derived from the eco-anxiety frameworks of Albrecht (2019), Clayton and Karazsia (2020), and Pihkala (2022), the study analyzed 312 coded passages across six eco-anxiety themes. Findings reveal that ecological grief (29.8%) and anticipatory loss (25.6%) constitute the dominant affective registers of the corpus, followed by helplessness and powerlessness (22.1%), solastalgia (21.2%), affective resilience (18.3%), and intergenerational despair (16.7%). The study further demonstrates that eco-anxiety is not merely depicted thematically but formally enacted through narrative fragmentation, temporal disruption, and second-person address. Cross-cultural analysis reveals that postcolonial cli-fi encodes eco-anxiety as inseparable from racial and political dispossession, challenging Western-centric psychological frameworks. The study proposes an original "eco-anxiety poetics" framework with significant implications for ecocritical scholarship, environmental education, climate communication, and therapeutic bibliotherapy practice.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

pi

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Computer Science & IT Earth & Planetary Sciences Economics, Econometrics & Finance Environmental Science

Description

Insight : International Journal of Social Research is a scientific journal in the form of research and can be accessed openly. This journal is published once a month by PT. Worldwide Research Publishing Insight : International Journal of Social Research provides a means for ongoing discussion of ...