My are researchers trying to sample water from hundreds of lakes around the world.

If this works, what it does is it gives us a very effective way to sample biodiversity for the least amount of effort.

It's Monday, April 22nd. Happy Earth Day. It's also Science Friday Day. I'm Cyfry producer Charles Barquist.

Coming up, we'll hear about a project to try to take a census of biodiversity

using the environmental DNA left behind in lakes.

But first guest host Maggie Kurth takes on the topic of eco-anxiety, the fear of depression caused

by impending climate change change and how new research is

helping scientists better understand how it manifests in different parts of the world.

In the last few years the fear and depression caused by climate change has gone from something we doom scroll about to something scientists are now seriously studying.

They're finding that eco-anxiety is something we humans all share all around the world,

but it looks different and has different impacts depending on where you are and who you are,

kind of like climate change itself.

Here to tell us what scientists have learned about the mental health impacts of climate change is Dr. Allison Wong, clinical

instructor at the University of California San Francisco. and out by defining what we mean by eco-anxiety. When this term comes up in science it, is it

referring to fear and dread of immediate risks? Is it referring to existential doom about the future? Is it referring to that feeling of

powerlessness to change something so much bigger than your own choices and

please stop me if I'm just using you as my personal psychiatrist now.

So those are good questions.

So yeah, this term eco-anxiety, there are other similar terms, climate distress,

climate grief or climate anxiety.

There's also a term so nostalgia,

which refers to kind of a nostalgia for your environment,

...