Why climate action is an opportunity multiplier for mental health

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a risk multiplier for mental health. Escalating climate hazards induce compounding stressors that destabilize the foundations of good mental health and well-being. This systemic threat ripples across geographies and generations1. Less appreciated is how climate action – cutting emissions and adapting to change – is an opportunity multiplier for mental health. Actually, the climate and mental health fields share synergistic goals, with overlaps in conditions that foster healthy minds and environments. In spite of this, mental health is rarely embedded in climate policy. Only 17% of national adaptation plans include actions addressing the mental health consequences of climate change, though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stresses that successful climate action must build resilience, not just of infrastructure, but of people and societies (www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2). Preventive psychiatry identifies key mental health determinants to foster people’s resilience2, such as stable early development, income equality, food security, community cohesion, and social support in the context of environmental hazards. Climate change threatens these determinants, while climate action relies on and can reinforce them. Minimizing fossil fuels and biomass burning lowers air pollution and its mental health toll. Even relatively low levels of air pollution can increase anxiety, depression and mental health service use, and high air pollution days carry increased suicide risk3. It is estimated that China’s air pollution policies prevented 13,000 to 79,000 (95% confidence interval) deaths from suicide between 2013 and 20174. Urban design matters for climate as well as mental health. Infrastructure promoting active travel (walking and cycling), connected communities, tree cover, and local biodiversity access can reduce fossil-fuel based transportation, and buffer climate change-related hazards such as floods and heatwaves. Accompanying this, physical activity can reduce anxiety and depression symptoms, while greenspace access and heightened nature connectedness can improve mental health. More links could be made: initiatives such as “green social prescribing” (prescribing nature connection to people experiencing mental health challenges) could facilitate community-based climate actions. Building design is also central to climate action and mental health. Australian and Irish schemes to improve home energy efficiencies reduced anxiety and depression while improving emotional and social well-being. Vitally, governmental cost savings were more clearly evident when accounting for health. In Australia, for every AUD of energy cost savings, 10 AUD were saved in health care5. Education is another essential system-level action. Young people call for education that tells the truth about climate change while building psychological resilience and agency – skills that benefit mental health beyond the climate context. Community cohesion is a powerful protective buffer against climate stressors, and climate action requires preparing communities to cope with escalating climate hazards. Collective climate action confers mental health benefits, and bridges individual and systemic transformation while building social connection. This is vital for good mental and physical health, and tackling the loneliness “epidemic”. Local knowledge and cultural practices are key. Initiatives that strengthen care for local environments through traditional cultural practices can synergistically confer mental health and well-being benefits, as shown in the Caring for Country initiatives with First Nations communities in Australia (https://soe.dcceew.gov.au). Global mental health advocates for expanding mental health care into community-level services. Global mental health tools, such as task sharing, can benefit climate resilience approaches, and simultaneously strengthen the ability of a community to cope and to spread proven adaptive strategies. At the same time, scaling the social infrastructures of climate action could provide an enabling opportunity for community-based mental health capacities. Workplace mental health and well-being is at risk. Extreme temperatures impair cognition and productivity. Poor youth mental health, linked to global megatrends including climate change, contributes to unemployment. Maintaining a healthy workforce in a changing climate and global energy transition requires designing for psychological resilience. Synergistic benefits for climate action and mental health can flow from appropriately designed climate-aware workplace mental health strategies. Thriving in the climate crisis and sustaining climate action requires psychological abilities: tolerating uncertainty, complexity, and uncomfortable emotions. Building these skills in individuals and communities (e.g., schools) can strengthen psychological determinants of good mental health. For instance, adolescents who can tolerate uncertainty have better mental health outcomes6. Positive psychology highlights meaning, engagement and social relationships as keys to well-being. Meaning-focused coping is among the most well-researched approaches to protect mental health while encouraging climate action. This requires and encourages emotional flexibility and values-based behaviors. Individual climate actions can follow a similar virtuous cycle to behavioral activation techniques in protecting mental health, especially when boosting agency, social connection and purpose. Individual-, community- and system-level actions interconnect. Realizing climate-mental health co-benefits requires systems-thinking that recognizes the cascading and interacting pathways connecting healthy environments and minds. It also requires decision-making spanning traditional siloed sectors, and transdisciplinary approaches crossing fields and cultures. Climate and mental health communities must embrace mechanisms to share knowledge and foster mutual understanding. Initiatives such as Connecting Climate Minds (www.connectingclimateminds.org) provide examples. Supportive infrastructure for such connective bridging requires critical investment. Prevention is cheaper than cure, for both psychiatry and climate. The world is on track for nearly 3°C of global boiling by the late century – when today’s children will still be working – slashing up to 34% off the global economy. The net cost of inaction is estimated to be “three times global health care spending”7. The true cost is likely far greater, with many impacts – such as on mental health – under-accounted. The extra mental health burden from climate hazards, air pollution and insufficient green space access could cost US$ 537 billion/year by 20508. On the other hand, mental health returns on climate action investments are rarely included in cost-benefit analyses. A word of caution: a systems perspective must recognize the possible mental health risks and unintended consequences of climate actions. For instance, transitioning away from fossil fuels may affect jobs. Climate action design must include diverse lived experiences of mental health needs and psychologically-informed, participatory decision-making, to mitigate unforeseen harms. Psychiatry can inform and benefit from synergistic climate actions. As a trusted profession, it can raise awareness among decision-makers and the public of the potential to create a mentally healthier future, and provide mental health expertise to bolster climate resilience efforts. Support for population-level climate resilience aligns with the field’s growing emphasis on prevention and positive mental health. Training on climate-mental health links should be embedded in psychiatric education, and psychiatrists should be equipped to support, design and implement co-beneficial climate actions. Psychiatry researchers can help understand and quantify climate actions’ mental health benefits (and possible risks). At the heart of responding to the climate crisis lies a profound opportunity to create “environment[s] that support mental health for all”9. Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and protecting biodiversity is not just climate-smart; it is brain-saving. Recognizing and acting on the climate action benefits for mental health can spark a virtuous cycle, where more people thrive.