Weather disasters, such as floods, wildfires, hurricanes, traumatize between 20% and 40% of those who are directly impacted, increasing rates of both short and longer-term depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts. The effects are not limited to those directly impacted. Disasters also stress those who observe them, whose loved ones are affected, and/or who learn about disasters through the news and social media. Such stresses include the chronic fear of environmental doom, or climate anxiety, helplessness, and loss of place and identity (known as solastalgia). From a mental health perspective, climate resilience includes the ability to cope with the psychological disruptions from climate change and ecological destruction, such as current or future loss of life, housing, resources, social support, social networks, and the need for relocation. 

• Self-efficacy: Your belief in your ability to organize and follow through with tasks to accomplish your goals.
• Adaptive capacity: You or your community’s ability to access and use resources effectively, adjust to potential damage, take advantage of opportunities, and/or cope with consequences.
• Collective efficacy: A group’s shared beliefs about its capability to accomplish collective tasks.
• Social capital: The strength of your supportive connections to others through family, school, work, neighborhood, and larger (including online) communities. Support can be emotional, as well as more tangible, for example: help with clean-up, supplies, rebuilding. Various types include:
  • Bonding social capital: Relationships with people similar to you; bridging social capital: Relationships with those who differ in demographic characteristics, such as age, socio-economic status, or race; and linking social capital: Relationships with others or institutions who hold relative power over you (political or financial).
• Social identity: How your sense of belonging to various social groups becomes integrated into your concept of self.  

While the mental health implications of climate change can affect everyone, impacts tend to be greatest for the most vulnerable and marginalized. Examples include people with pre-existing chronic physical and mental health problems, senior citizens, women (especially if pregnant), children, communities of color, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, and some ethnic minority groups. Individuals who live in certain regions also face more risk, such as people in developing countries, in areas with widespread poverty, less robust government, or less reliable infrastructures. Climate change is a threat multiplier for other social determinants of poor physical and mental health. For example, in the aftermath of a climate disaster, those most vulnerable and socially isolated may be even less likely to be connected to information regarding resources offering aid. This underscores the importance for climate resilience strategies to understand these inequities and actively address them.

Without drastic reductions in carbon emissions, the likelihood of traumatic stresses will continue to grow and cause harm, especially to those most vulnerable. For example, research has shown direct negative effects of climate change on young people’s mental health; a global study reported more than 50% of the 10,000 participants feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. Extreme weather events will further tax parents and other caretakers’ ability to adequately care for their children’s emotional and physical well-being. The effects of stress can increase parents’ likelihood to develop PTSD and engage in self-protective behaviors, such as avoidant withdrawal, self-medicating with substances, and/or engaging in other maladaptive behaviors.

Compounding the direct impacts of climate change on mental health are the related economic costs (e.g., job loss, displacement, homelessness) and social costs (e.g., isolation, reduced opportunities for exercise and other stress-relieving activities). The COVID-19 pandemic is a recent example of how mental health conditions, suicide attempts, drug overdoses, violence, abuse, and neglect can rise during times of increased stress and social confinement.

• In New Orleans USA, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, different types of social capital were important for surviving, including the pooling of food, finances, information, and other resources. Bridging and linking social capital offered pathways for longer-term coping, such as home rebuilding and community revitalization.
• Social connections and perceptions of non-family support protected against stress and depressive symptoms after a severe flood in Kentucky, United States.
• After a tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, residents’ perception of community participation reduced the risk of PTSD and depression, even after controlling for pre-tsunami mental health variables.
• In India, individuals with higher belief in collective efficacy were more likely to participate in community activities preserving water supplies to adapt to water scarcity. This link was stronger in communities with higher collective efficacy.
• During COVID-19 in Australia, an informal community intervention (Neighbor Day) offered to residents protected those who attended against later decreases in well-being reported when lockdown measures were tightened. The protection was shown to be directly related to a higher sense of social identity, and not to age, gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors the researchers considered.
• Researchers like Albert Bandura have demonstrated that the higher a group perceives their collective efficacy, such as their ability to mitigate climate change, the greater their likelihood to coordinate and perform behaviors that will increase their chance of success, despite initial setbacks or other barriers.

• Strengthen your individual and collective efficacy by connecting with others to build community and engage in civic action.
  • Join a Climate Café, an inclusive space to get together to talk and act on climate change. 
  • For mental health or social work professionals, join fellow practitioners: Climate Psychiatry Alliance, Climate Psychology Alliance, or Social Workers for Climate Action.
  • Join your neighbors through the Transition Town Movement, an international grassroots movement, or through statewide programs like California’s Cool Block. Both are examples in which neighbors collaborate to build community resilience to the challenges of climate change. 
  • The challenges of climate change can worsen mental well-being, but also have the potential to help us work together and show empathy, compassion and altruism. The term post-traumatic growth refers to the process of meeting trauma with hope, the feeling of belonging, gratitude, personal growth, and transformation. 
• Look over these 10 essentials for effective community resilience initiatives: Community resilience for a 1.5 degrees Celsius world
• Support legislation to fund community-based initiatives to address mental health at the population level. U.S. citizens can support the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act of 2023 by contacting their elected senators and representatives.
• Check out the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, a website to help people find and use tools and information to build climate resilience.

Transformational Resilience: How Building Human Resilience to Climate Disruption Can Safeguard Society and Increase Wellbeing by Bob Doppelt, published in 2016 by Routeledge.

Climate change as ACE, published in The Register-Guard on August 28, 2019, by Bob Doppelt.

Climate change as a “threat multiplier”: History, uses and future of the concept, published in the Center for Climate & Security on January 3, 2023, by Sherri Goodman and Pauline Baudu.

Speaking of Psychology: The psychology of climate change, with Susan Clayton, PhD, published by the American Psychological Association (APA) in April 2019

The Climate Crisis Is Global, but These 6 Places Face the Most Severe Consequences, published in Time on September 30, 2019, by Tara Law.

The Concept of Resilience: Understanding its Origins, Meaning and Utility, published by the Torrens Resilience Institute on March 14, 2010, by Alastair McAslan.

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