What are the Potential Challenges?

While mental health should get addressed alongside these pressing issues of climate change migration/adaptation, doing so will come with significant challenges. While many challenges may arise two in particular stand out as prescient to the current debate: the difficulty of attributing causality of adverse outcomes back to climate change in research and the shortcoming in adaptation for the challenges to come. In order to understand how to make progress, these challenges must be acknowledged and understood.

Even though the mental health implications of climate will be staggering, attributing causality of individual-level consequences to climate change can become difficult (3). Climate change (and climate-induced migration) is invariably a process that plays out over a long period of time. Its impacts are often felt much later than they are caused (9), and its impacts on mental health are no different in that regard (3). It is difficult to determine the chain of causality of the effects climate change has, in part because some of these effects remain to be seen (3,4). Researchers tend to look at the direct mental health impact of isolated events that could be exacerbated by climate change rather than the holistic threat climate change may cause to mental health (6,3). Tools for measuring the impact of climate change on mental health will need to be improved moving forward to get a fuller understanding of the problem.

The other relevant challenge will be how mental health gets folded into adaptation plans; strategies of mobility and adaptation will be important to the future climate change response (10,6). However, preparedness to address an issue can lag behind a mere understanding of the issue, as evidenced by population changes in the early 2010s (11). So, even if people acknowledge that mental health concerns are part of the system of issues that must get addressed (4), additional work will need to be done to carry out meaningful steps in the right direction.

Is Mental Health Currently Being Incorporated?

In recent research, climate change, migration, and mental health have been adequately linked to one another. The understanding that they all exist as part of the same system remains prescient (7,4) and calls to amplify such an understanding through future research abound (3,4,8). However, there is work to be done for both researchers and policymakers. Even though the cries for international policymakers to address the mental health implications of climate change span more than a decade (12), some present-day policy proposals hardly link these issues together at all. The 2018 Compact on Safe and Orderly Migration, the first international effort to address climate-related migration (13), addresses it only indirectly, saying they want to keep an eye on adaptation measures and challenges that will come from climate related migration (14). The outline for Working Group II’s contributions to the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes no direct mention of mental health, despite hundreds of pages of work related to climate change adaptation (15). This astonishing gap calls for continued efforts to not only ensure that this issue continues getting the research focus it deserves, but also that the research findings get woven into policy sooner rather than later, ensuring that, to the best extent possible, those that need treatment for mental health conditions can access it.

Conclusion: What can we do?

The process of meaningfully improving the issue at hand will be multifaceted and take time. However, young public health professionals can still do a great deal. Efforts must start by raising awareness and holding accountable those who are responsible for averting the worst that climate change might bring.

Raising awareness amongst our own networks and engaging with our friends and colleagues amplify this pressure while building the political will necessary to tackle this issue. Here are some ways you can engage with the issues surrounding mental health and climate change:

Recommendations

Stay informed.

Change will start when a critical mass become informed about progress toward addressing climate change and the relevant issues surrounding it. The IPCC, one of the international bodies designated by the UN to tackle climate change, has an extensive website where they detail not only the policies that they are taking up but also how young academics can continue to support their efforts (16). Understanding these challenges is the first step toward advocating for mental health to be in the important international discussions regarding climate-related migration.

Make your voice heard.

This set of challenges will be unlike any other, and we ought to have a plan to confront it. Adaptation assessments like Climate Change and Health Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessments (CCHVAAs) can help countries understand what opportunities and resources they have to address climate change and what the concerns will be moving forward (5,3). Public support could be critical to ensuring that these plans are developed and followed in each country. Passionate citizens should be encouraged to get in touch with their political representatives about this issue where possible and encourage others to do the same.