What are the psychological impacts of climate change?
- Climate change can have consequences for mental health including negative emotions, stress, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress.
- Rising temperatures have serious psychological impacts, especially for people already suffering from mental health problems.
- This phenomenon results in an increase in the suicide rate: for every 1°C increase, there is a 1% increase in suicides.
- Exposure to a climate disaster, such as a fire, can lead to climate trauma.
- Beyond depression or stress, these events also affect the functioning of our brain and its ability to concentrate.
Increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, extreme weather events, damage to biodiversity and ecosystems… The physical effects of climate change are now being felt in every country in the world. In its 2022 report “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, the IPCC highlighted for the first time another important aspect of climate change: its adverse effect on the well-being and mental health of populations. The climate emergency is also a mental health emergency. For every person physically affected by a climate disaster, 40 are affected psychologically, says the report from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, UK. But what are the practical psychological effects of climate change?
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about eco-anxiety as a way of referring to the negative emotions generated by the climate situation. Susan Clayton, Chair of Psychology at the University of Wooster in the United States, is one of the authors of the IPCC report. This specialist in the relationship between humans and nature points out that “eco-anxiety is not in itself a sign of mental illness; it is a normal response to a very worrying situation. However, some people reach a level of anxiety that threatens their mental health. This can affect their sleep, their ability to concentrate and work, or to relax and have fun.”
Eco-anxiety and “solastagy”
The psychologist studied eco-anxiety to determine whether this phenomenon had real implications for mental health, or whether it was just a word for climate “woes”. With her colleague Bryan T. Karazsia, Susan Clayton developed a scale based on mental health measures. The aim was to check whether measures of eco-anxiety were correlated with established measures of psychological problems. And this was indeed the case: eco-anxiety can therefore, in some cases, have a significant psychological impact.
Another emotion is also cited in the report from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, solastagia. “It is a feeling of homesickness for a place in which you are actually living. It’s seeing changes in your territory, and having a sense of grief, of loss as a result,” says Jessica Newberry Le Vay, a fellow at the Institute for Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. The populations most affected are children, people working on the land, and indigenous communities, who witness first-hand the changes in the landscape around them.
The report states that there is a 1% increase in suicide rates for every 1°C increase in temperature.
Climate change involves slow and gradual changes in our environments. One of these is rising temperatures. In addition to its impact on the ecosystem, this phenomenon has serious consequences for mental health. High temperatures are associated with higher rates of suicide, but also of psychiatric hospitalisation. “There is an approximate 1% increase in suicide rates for every 1°C increase in temperature above a specific threshold for each geographical area,” says Jessica Newberry Le Vay. People who suffer from mental illness, particularly psychosis, dementia, or addiction, are two to three times more likely to die during heatwaves than people without mental health problems, the Grantham Institute report says. In addition, there is also an increase in conflict, violence – especially domestic violence – and assaults. “The general level of well-being is falling,” says Susan Clayton.
While we don’t yet know exactly why heat has these effects, there are some possible explanations. High temperatures disrupt sleep, which is an essential component of mental health. Temperature changes can also create physiological changes, affecting blood flow and the nervous system, which will have cognitive and emotional impacts, the Grantham Institute argues.
Extreme weather events cause climate “trauma”
Climate change affects populations indirectly, through awareness of its effects, through the consequences on territories, through the threat to food, economic or housing security. “These are stress factors that can lead to psychological problems,” says psychologist Susan Clayton. Climate change also damages people’s physical and mental health directly, through extreme weather events, which are observed in all regions of the world. Fires, hurricanes, and floods are on the rise, and the IPCC expects these events to increase as warming progresses. Many researchers have looked at the psychological effects of these disasters. Susan Clayton reviewed this literature for the IPCC report. The most common symptoms are post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, increased stress, feelings of grief, bereavement, and uncertainty about the future.
As of 2019, the term climate trauma refers to the psychological distress caused by environmental destruction. Jyoti Mishra, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, specialising in neuroscience and mental health, is working on the deadliest fire in California’s history, the Camp Fire. Occurring from 8th-26th November 2018, the fire ravaged 620 km2 of forest, and destroyed the town of Paradise. Its first study quantified the number of people who reported trauma. The number of symptoms such as post-traumatic stress, depression or anxiety was two to three times higher in people who had experienced the fire, compared to those who had not been exposed to it.
Cognitive damage
In January this year, Jyoti Mishra published the first study to examine the neurological and cognitive impacts of weather-related trauma. The aim is to determine whether brain function is affected by exposure to an extreme weather event. 75 people took part in the study six to twelve months after the fire. Of these, 27 were directly exposed to the fire either through the destruction of their home or the loss of a loved one; 21 were indirectly exposed as they witnessed the fire but were not personally affected; and 27 were not exposed at all.
Cognitive tests were developed to analyse the mental processes involved in memory, learning, thinking and interference processing, i.e. the ability to ignore distractions. “For an hour, individuals were given these tests to focus their attention on something, to make their memory work. All brain activity was recorded with an electroencephalogram,” the psychiatrist explains. “These tests were chosen because they are at the heart of human cognitive abilities, and they have been shown to be important abilities in the context of trauma, depression or mental health problems.”
To observe interference processing, participants were asked to focus on an object in the middle of a screen, such as a fish, and say whether it was pointing left or right. Meanwhile, other objects appeared on the screen. Those exposed to the fires, both directly and indirectly, had 20% less accurate responses than the control group. This meant that they were more distracted and had more difficulty concentrating on a task.
People exposed to fire have more difficulty concentrating on a task.
“In addition, we found greater frontal and parietal brain activity for the directly exposed group. This means that the brain is making more effort to function, to stay focused and attentive,” says the study author. “This can be compared to the experience of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who become very aware and attentive to their environment, and pay attention to everything because everything seems like a threat.”
For Jyoti Mishra, it is very important to develop similar research to understand the effects of climate trauma on our brain, on our biology. These results can help normalise these symptoms and develop more appropriate treatments. But are these climate-related psychological experiences specific to other problems already identified, such as post-traumatic stress disorder? “We don’t know at the moment. It seems that there are differences in the symptoms, but also in the best way to treat them therapeutically. We are still in the early stages, and we need more research,” says Susan Clayton.
Inequalities in the psychological impacts of climate change
What has been widely documented by research is that we are not all equal when it comes to climate change-related mental health problems. People who are already vulnerable in society are even more likely to develop problems. “This is because of the resources available to cope with these events, including practical resources such as air conditioning, shelter, and economic and social resources,” says the American psychologist. Some groups are more affected, such as the economically disadvantaged, children, the elderly and women.
So, what can be done to mitigate these psychological impacts? In addition to developing research on these subjects, to refine treatments, specialists agree on the need to increase the resources allocated to mental health. “We need to provide people with emotional tools and create support and assistance networks for people who have experienced disasters,” say Susan Clayton and Jessica Newberry Le Vay. It is also possible to act upstream to avoid these impacts, by developing easier access to nature and safe housing, and by strengthening safe social ties.
