Eco-Affective Health: Exploring Emotions, Behavior and Well-Being in Sustainability

Sustainability transitions ultimately depend on sustained human engagement, yet sustainability science has largely overlooked a foundational determinant of whether such engagement endures: affect. Although emotions shape how environmental change is perceived, evaluated, and acted upon, they remain conceptually fragmented-typically treated as secondary outcomes, communication tools, or clinical concerns rather than as a core dimension of sustainability itself. This Perspective introduces Eco-Affective Health, offered as a conceptual lens rather than an exhaustive theory of environmental behavior that positions affective dynamics as a central regulatory mechanism operating in continuous interaction with cognitive appraisal and linking environmental conditions to human well-being, behavior, and the long-term viability of sustainability transitions. Eco-Affective Health conceptualizes emotions as dynamic, context-sensitive responses emerging from interactions among environmental exposures, social structures, and lived experience within complex human-environment systems, with cascading effects on motivation, agency, collective action, and disengagement. By embedding affect within socio-environmental systems, the framework explains why similar environmental challenges can generate divergent trajectories of sustained engagement, emotional fatigue, or polarization across populations and over time. Eco-Affective Health distinguishes affective responses to environmental change from psychopathology, reframing them as adaptive signals that reflect the alignment-or misalignment-between sustainability pathways and human experience. The framework's scope, its relationship to cognition, and its position alongside cognate inner-outer sustainability and mindfulness-based frameworks are discussed explicitly, together with directions for future systematic empirical synthesis. By foregrounding affect as a foundational layer of sustainability science, this framework offers a human-centered lens for understanding behavioral persistence, policy legitimacy, and social resilience under accelerating environmental change.