Kuala Lampur, Dec. 22 -- In 2025, young people open their phones to see Pakistan's latest climate-fuelled floods, Europe's relentless heatwaves, and thick haze from fires raging across continents. Many of these youths are nowhere near the disaster zones, yet they lie awake at night worrying about rising food prices, shrinking job opportunities, and even whether it is ethical to have children in a world under threat.

This chronic unease is no longer dismissed as teenage melodrama - it has a name: eco-anxiety. Researchers increasingly treat it as a pressing public-health challenge, recognising that the climate crisis is not just an environmental emergency but a mental-health one as well.

A landmark survey of 10,000 young people across ten...