Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for humanity in this century. Communicating in a way that raises awareness of the risk climate changes poses while at the same time not inducing negative feelings, like helplessness, is a challenge. On one hand research has shown that emphasizing the severity of climate change is related to higher risk perception, which could lead to more pro-environmental behavior. On the other hand, it could trigger higher helplessness which is associated with lower motivation to act climate friendly. Previous research showed that controllability leads to lower risk perception and lower levels of learned helplessness. To our knowledge there is no research investigating the direct impact of controllability in the context of climate change. Thus, we conducted an experiment with N = 220 participants to examine the influence of controllability on risk perception and learned helplessness in the context of climate change. Participants received six climate change scenarios that differed only in induced controllability. There were four conditions: In the high controllability conditions participants received the information that climate change could be influenced by the government or oneself. In the low controllability conditions participants received the information that the impact of climate change, for example the amount of deforestation on CO2 emissions, is not reversible. Results showed that in all conditions risk perception increased but only in the conditions with high controllability learned helplessness decreased. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of including solutions when addressing the negative impacts of climate change.