Climate Change Effect on Mental Health
Increased suicide rates, home loss, polluted air during pregnancy
What is climate change?
Climate change is the warming of the planet’s atmosphere that causes long-term shifts in environmental temperature and weather patterns. The leading cause of this increase in temperature is the human-caused greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect is the accumulation of chemical elements, mainly CO2, within the atmosphere. The heat from the sun penetrates the atmosphere and heats the planet. However, only some of it is absorbed by the planet. And when the rest of the heat cannot escape back into the universe due to the thicker atmospheric layer, it ends up lingering on the surface and heating the climate, which causes climate change.
What is mental health?
Mental health is our social, emotional and psychological well-being. It determines how happy we are, what we think, feel, and how we act on those feelings. It also defines how we make choices in our lives, achieve happiness, handle stress and how we relate to others in our community.
It is the most critical factor of our conscious mind. Positive mental health helps us work more productively, participate in communities more meaningfully, cope with the chaos that is life, and also helps us realise our full potential.
Wholistic approach to health
We all know that climate change causes physical damage to our bodies and well-being through hurricanes, floods and droughts; however, an often-overlooked side of the story is the effect of global warming on mental health.
The climate change researchers finally connected the dots, that as the climate change affects health and mental health is just part of the general health, we humans decided to take a more holistic approach and look into climate change effects on the mental health.
According to World Health Organisation’s Mental Health and Climate Change Policy released in 2022, air pollution caused by humans using fossil fuels as our primary energy source causes the greenhouse effect, which in turn causes respiratory diseases. These diseases reduce mobility and work capacity as well as put a strain on health care services in general.
Prolonged droughts, which are a proven result of global warming, disrupt the agricultural food supply and raise water scarcity concerns. In addition, malnutrition and dehydration are leading causes of increased risk for developing mental health conditions and neurological problems.
In low-income and high-conflict areas, when affected by agricultural disruption and forced migration by rising sea levels, the data shows that one in five people experience adverse mental health conditions due to increased exposure to conflict caused by scarcity of resources.
Indigenous populations are impacted even worse due to their perspective of positive well-being directly attached to the harmony with nature. However, when unprecedented change breaks that bond by loss of wildlife or extreme weather events, the local people experience adverse emotional reactions, which lead to mental health challenges.
Due to increased awareness of the situation, new concepts of mental health terminology have been created. We hear conditions such as climate change anxiety, solastalgia, eco-anxiety, environmental distress, ecological grief and climate-related psychological distress.
We also have to look into stress-related health problems; it is clear that stress negatively impacts many aspects of our physical and mental well-being. For example, it can lower our immune response, disrupt sleep, and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. In addition, the experiments prove that even wounds heal slower when a person’s sympathetic nervous system is activated. And people get pretty stressed when they lose their homes due to floods or hurricanes caused by global warming.
Extreme weather events have proven to cause depressive anxiety and stress within interpersonal relationships, sometimes even including partner violence. And in the case of children, the relocation caused due to loss of home as well as suspension or changing the school cause traumatic events affecting their mental health development in the future.
Some people have difficulty dealing with helplessness as they feel they cannot do anything to stop the environmental change. We also see rising mistrust of government amongst young people, who feel betrayed by a lack of actionable country-wide policies.
Rising temperatures have also been linked to increased suicide rates in many countries. World Health Organisation also states that breathing polluted air can significantly increase the chance of developing a mental disease in adults and even unborn children if mothers are exposed to hazardous particulate matter in the polluted air during pregnancy.
The response to climate change effects on mental health
Of course, the best response to these issues would be urgency in creating worldwide actionable policies. However, only collaboration from local governments can do this; yet, to begin with, not all country leaders even believe that climate change is real.
We also should aim to increase our health workforce to respond to mental health issues caused by climate change. Collecting data, analysing it and bringing awareness about the situation is the only way forward. Further research, development of sustainable climate-resilient technologies, management of current corporate environmental responsibilities, and most importantly, education on the adverse long-term effects is critical in advancing the cause to save humanity from destroying itself and our planet.
What can manufacturers do to reduce global warming?
How a product will affect the environment starts at the product design stage. What kind of materials will be used, and how eco-friendly are they? What kind of manufacturing methods will be used? Are they environmentally friendly? What would be the manufacturing plants’ carbon footprint to produce the product?
All these questions can be answered and considered when designing a product. Decisions to use less plastic, addressing the wastage from the manufacturing process, ensuring the plant uses renewable energy and keeping the supply chain short all help decrease the producer’s contribution to greenhouse gasses and global warming.
Using transportation modes with the lowest amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere can be achieved by avoiding air shipment. In addition, solid logistics planning whilst working with the manufacturing plant to produce smaller product batches is also an effective way to reduce the need for extensive transport.
Finished product packaging has a very high impact on the environment; we can mitigate this by minimising the amount of packaging the product requires, using recycled materials and producing returnable packaging for the end-consumer.
Improving product end-of-life procedures has significant benefits to the environment and product manufacturers. Remember that the returned goods stream is the biggest supplier of your manufactured products.
Optimising the returned goods can be achieved by improving the returned goods process. For example, the products can be refurbished to like-new standards and introduced back into inventory or sold as refurbished for a lower price to make them approachable to even more customers.
This process is called Third-Party Reverse Logistics (3PRL) and can be outsourced locally within the relevant country through companies such as TFix.
Conclusion
By now, we all understand that climate change is here and affects our health and well-being negatively. However, let’s take a more holistic approach and analyse its effects on mental health. We can see that extreme weather events cause traumatic relocations for families. Breathing polluted air is connected to developing mental health conditions, and increased temperatures have been linked to increased suicide rates. So we have to start taking climate change seriously.
The effort has to be broad, as wide as the world, and the first step is eliminating ignorance through education, research and government-level actionable policies.
Manufacturers can improve their response to reducing carbon footprint by choosing sustainable materials during the design stage and getting more involved in the manufacturing process, ensuring eco-friendly manufacturing, reducing materials wastage, recyclable packaging and having solid end-of-life and returned goods management techniques.