In the eight years since Jen Brown moved to Tampa Bay, she’s lived through a devastating red tide, back-to-back hurricanes and an era of rapid growth.
At 52, she worries often about the future of the region’s environment. She does what she can, she said, to stem the region’s far-reaching problems like pollution and habitat loss. The St. Petersburg woman uses cloth napkins and bamboo toilet paper. She clears trash from beaches.
But she’s anxious about the state of Tampa Bay’s environment.
“Most people here probably don’t think about it,” Brown said. “I probably think about it at least once a day, if not more.”
Recent research shows she isn’t alone.
A new study by the Tampa Bay Estuary Program found that roughly one in six people living in the Tampa Bay region is experiencing moderate to severe “eco-anxiety,” or negative feelings about the environmental degradation – overdevelopment, pollution, rising seas and temps – unfolding around them.
The peer-reviewed findings, published this summer in the journal People and Nature, localize a growing source of stress for many Americans. More than a third of the nation’s adults say a warming world is a regular cause of anxiety, according to 2025 data from the American Psychiatric Association.
The study’s author said the Tampa Bay area is a unique case study for understanding how people feel about the loss of the natural world around them.
More than 3 million people are living near the state’s largest open-water estuary in a region that has experienced rapid climate and land-use change; it remains vulnerable to overdevelopment; and it’s in a state that has one of the worst track records for access to mental health providers.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat or Republican or Independent,” said Blake Simmons, the study’s author and an environmental social scientist with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.
“We’re seeing people anxious about the state of the environment across the board, and it’s much more common than we expect,” he said.
Simmons surveyed more than 1,200 of the region’s residents for the research.
He used a scale for screening general anxiety disorders and asked how often, over a 2-week period, people are bothered when thinking about pollution, species extinction, and rising temperatures and seas, among other issues.
Of everyone in the general public surveyed, nearly 350 people said they’re regularly on edge for several days in that timeframe. Sixty three people said they’re anxious nearly every day, according to data Simmons shared with the Tampa Bay Times.
“This a relatively common occurrence, and so we should take it seriously,” Simmons said. “It means that now more than ever, we really need a clear pathway to solutions, not just to solve environmental problems — but to improve the mental health of the population.”
In Tampa Bay, eco-anxiety symptoms are most severe for people who are regularly doing outdoor activities and people who hold little hope that individual action can solve environmental issues, the research shows.
Because of that, the study underscores how environmental practitioners — organizations hosting cleanups and outdoor excursions, but also city and county governments that lead public outreach — can better incorporate ways to address growing eco-anxiety among locals.
Simmons outlines how these groups can add goals into their programming to reduce stress about environmental degradation: recreating outdoors, citizen science and volunteering, among others.
“Folks who are working in the environmental space have the ability to help people in the Tampa Bay area understand environmental change and feel like they’re not powerless,” said Jo Huxster, an associate professor of environmental studies at Eckerd College.
Huxster told the Tampa Bay Times in 2022 that most of her class had a form of eco-anxiety. Four years later, and students’ worries have only seemed to grow: Tampa Bay was reminded of its vulnerabilities to rising seas by a hurricane one-two punch, and federal environmental regulations continue to be stripped.
“In many cases, it seems like we’re going backwards,” she said.
Huxster, who studies how to communicate climate change, said she isn’t surprised by the study’s findings but hopes it continues to spark thoughtful conversations about how to grapple with feelings of hopelessness — and then how to act on it.
“It’s important that people are talking about how they’re feeling,” she said.
The study found several likely hotspots for high stress about the region’s environmental issues. Some inland ZIP codes, on the outskirts of the Tampa Bay watershed in places like Dade City and Lakeland, had more than 30% of people saying they have moderate to severe symptoms of eco-anxiety.
Suburbs outside of Tampa, like Riverview and Thonotosassa, also have areas with high amounts of eco-anxiety symptoms, the study found.
The regions most concerned about environmental issues tend to be underserved communities, often the direct recipients of environmental injustices or increased pollution, according to the research. The pattern held true in underserved neighborhoods in St. Petersburg and Clearwater, too.
Despite her worries, Jen Brown, the St. Petersburg woman, says surrounding herself with other nature enthusiasts and working together at a beach cleanup or volunteer event helps give her a sense of personal agency. It helps quell the feelings that not all hope is lost.
“I’m just one person,” she said, “But there are things I can do.”
“If I can make one person reconsider what they’re consuming, and how to be more mindful, then maybe that grows exponentially.”
The Tampa Bay Times launched the Environment Hub in 2025 to focus on some of Florida’s most urgent and enduring challenges. You can contribute through our journalism fund by clicking here.