made a commitment to build climate-resilient and low-carbon national health systems in the coming years.
Discussions around climate and health tend to focus on how climate change affects physical health – injuries and deaths resulting from typhoons, undernutrition from food insecurity, increasing emergency room visits due to exposure to extreme heat, among others. What is often forgotten is that climate change affects our brains and hearts too. Our mental and emotional health are very much influenced by our surrounding environment, including the changing climate.
As climate and health scholar-advocates from the Philippines – one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries – we are too familiar with how extreme weather events, such as typhoons and flooding, take lives, destroy property, and displace communities. These disasters then generate emotional distress, especially among the vulnerable in society, including children, women, elderly people, low-income families, and people with disabilities.
Apart from the emotional distress brought about by abrupt catastrophic events, the climate crisis is also generating other types of psychological reactions across the population – related to ongoing climate issues. For instance, mental and emotional distress is now being experienced by families living in coastal communities, whose
by the rising sea level, as well as by farmers who are beginning to face more dry spells, fearing loss of harvest and their ability to put food on their family’s table.Meanwhile, young people who see climate-related extreme events on social media happening in other places, or who learn about the slowness of climate action among national and global leaders, experience different forms of “climate anxiety,” feeling deeply worried and angry about their portentous future.