Abstract
Climate change is a major global public-health challenge that will have wide-ranging impacts on human psychological health and well-being. Children and adolescents are at particular risk because of their rapidly developing brain, vulnerability to disease, and limited capacity to avoid or adapt to threats and impacts. They are also more likely to worry about climate change than any other age group. Drawing on a developmental life-course perspective, we show that climate-change-related threats can additively, interactively, and cumulatively increase psychopathology risk from conception onward; that these effects are already occurring; and that they constitute an important threat to healthy human development worldwide. We then argue that monitoring, measuring, and mitigating these risks is a matter of social justice and a crucial long-term investment in developmental and mental health sciences. We conclude with a discussion of conceptual and measurement challenges and outline research priorities going forward.
Highlights
Climate change is a global public-health emergency
An estimated 22.5 million people have been displaced by climateor weather-related disasters each year for the past 7 years (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2021), increasing mental health vulnerability (Siriwardhana & Stewart, 2013)
In August 2019, the first ever national survey of the mental health impacts of climate change reported that residents of Greenland were experiencing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety about their changing landscapes and climate (Minor et al, 2019)
Summary
The body of literature linking climate-change effects to mental-health risk is growing, much less has been reported about risks to children. There has been limited systematic theoretical or empirical work examining the pathways and processes linking climate-change-related stressors and mental-health vulnerability in children and adolescents, which is urgently needed so that effective adaptative and mitigative strategies can be implemented These challenges, we argue, are ideally studied from a developmental life-course perspective. Anxiety, anger, and frustration about the effect of climate change, including the current and anticipated destruction and loss of landscapes, biodiversity, ecosystems, traditional lands, and special places These threats can aggravate existing symptoms or lower the threshold for the onset of new mental-health disorders. Social and economic disruptions including the effects of water scarcity, reduced agricultural yields, famine, civil unrest, forced displacement, and war
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