Climate anxiety: Children's author Lauren Child and 'Clarice Bean' take on climate change fears in new book

The award-winning children’s author - best known for her much-loved Charlie and Lola and Clarice Bean characters - has released a new book this week, shining a light on climate anxiety. Fear and concern about climate change has been soaring amongst young people, and with the world just experiencing its warmest year on record, it's really no wonder.

YouGov polling on behalf of the Woodland Trust last year found that one in three young Brits were scared (33%), sad (34%) or pessimistic (34%) about the climate - with 28% feeling "overwhelmed". It's already affecting their future plans, with nearly one in four 16 to 24-year-olds considering having less children of their own for this very reason.

For Ms Child, this kind of anxiety was all too familiar. "I always write about things that are of interest to me, inspiring to me, troubling to me - it's sort of a way of figuring things out," she told NationalWorld. Her new story, Clarice Bean: Smile, was in many ways a way of dealing with her own feelings "about the environmental crisis we're in".

Ms Child said a while back, she began to feel overwhelmed by it all. "It was preventing me being able to think and work," she said. "I was beginning to lose hope... You can't live like that."

Over the last two decades she had been visiting schools and talking to children about her books, and one of the things they talked about quite often was worries. She noticed many of them shared that same worry, akin to how young people had worried about the threat of nuclear war when she was growing up.

"They're having to deal with such a lot, at such an early age," she said. "I just get this wall of worry coming back at me. When you're just told how bad everything is, it can be really hard to see a way through... [But] by talking about it - it helps people not to internalise their worry."

For her, what had finally cut through was starting to look at the small stuff. She went on a tour to learn about her local moths, part of a learning journey into how every insect, plant and animal was important.

That was the message she wanted readers to take away from Smile; not one of unrelenting positivity, of smiling even when things were bad - but one of finding something to smile about. "Valuing the things we have, and taking joy and pleasure in what we have. Those small things add up to something big."

Ms Child said she wanted young people to understand they were were an important part of that puzzle. "Children are especially important, because they're going to inherit all of this," she said.

The titular Clarice Bean had a quote in the new book about feeling "too small to make a difference", she continued, using the humble plankton as an analogy. "They're one of the tiniest creatures on the planet, but without them, where would we be? Probably living on Mars."

For parents whose children were feeling anxiety about the climate, her advice was to tackle the issue in a smaller, manageable way. "I do think it's about looking at things close up," she said.

That could be as simple as planting a few shrubs or flowers in a pot on your front step. "You begin to see which ones attract which creatures." Children could take photos of them and look them up, she added, and find out about the whole network of biodiversity a single plant can support.

"Gardens and plants are very very important to us... [They] greatly improve your environment," Ms Child said. "I started growing houseplants again during the lockdown. They remind you that things keep going."

To launch the new book, Ms Child joined a tree-planting event at Torriano Primary School in London's Kentish Town. The trees came from the Woodland Trust, which gives away more than a million free trees every year - a "brilliant" scheme she wanted to encourage more schools and community groups across the UK to take advantage of.

Steve Dewhurst, from the Trust’s tree pack team, said the school was a "shining example" of how learning about nature and wildlife could become an integral part of a school curriculum. "Torriano applied for 15 saplings last year and we all had great fun helping plant them. The pupils and teachers were all fully engaged and were literally prepared to get their hands dirty for nature.

"As an inner-city school there is limited green space, but it shows there is no space too small to get trees in the ground and - as Lauren says and Clarice has learned - every tree planted makes a difference," he continued. "Planting trees, helping them grow and seeing and learning how they benefit wildlife and people - and contribute to a brighter and cleaner environment is a wonderful activity for children which they'll always remember."

Clarice Bean: Smile by Lauren Child, published by Harper Collins Children's Books, is available in bookstores now.