Climate change is affecting mental health, psychological wellbeing, and their social and environmental determinants. Acute temperature increase, heatwaves, and humidity have been associated with worsened mental health outcomes and increased suicidality. Through indirect pathways, hazards such as droughts can disrupt agricultural production, affect livelihoods, and cause food and water scarcity and other hardships that affect family relationships, increase stress, and negatively impact mental health, with differences between genders. Climate change can also exacerbate conflict and violence, and can influence people’s decision to migrate, which can in turn affect mental health and wellbeing. Climate change can also impact the mental health of populations who either choose to stay or are unable to migrate, with studies showing that mental health can be compromised by the feeling of being trapped.
Marginalized and vulnerable populations are often disproportionately affected by mental health impacts related to climate change, which can worsen pre-existing mental health inequalities, especially where health care is inadequate. Indigenous people may be more strongly affected by climate change-induced ecological breakdown. Older people, women, and religious or ethnic minorities are particularly at risk of adverse mental health outcomes, and young people have been shown to be more prone to anxiety, phobias, depression, stress-related conditions, substance abuse, sleep disorders, reduced capacity to regulate emotions, and increased cognitive deficits. The increasingly visible effects of the climate crisis have given rise to emerging concepts, such as climate change anxiety, solastalgia, eco-anxiety, and ecological grief.
Integrating mental health considerations within adaptation, mitigation, and disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts could both reduce climate change-related mental health risks and deliver mental health co-benefits. Actions to reduce heat and ambient air pollution through urban redesign, such as improved shade and green space, walkable neighbourhoods, and improved active and public transport infrastructure, can provide mental health co-benefits by promoting physical activity, better sleep quality, increased social connectivity, providing more cooling spaces, and increasing exposure to greenness.
The persistent lack of standardised definitions, stigmatisation and lack of recognition of mental health in many places, and scarcity of data on mental health impacts and care hinders the capacity to identify populations at risk and develop targeted resilience strategies, to monitor and assess the mental health implications of climate change and climate action, and ultimately to develop mental health indicators. Nonetheless, the world has sufficient experience and evidence to guide immediate action. Rapidly accelerating efforts to address the impacts of climate change on mental health and psychosocial wellbeing is essential to protect all dimensions of human health.
(This editorial column has been extracted from ‘The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: health at the mercy of fossil fuels’ released October 25, 2022)