Hotter temperatures, increasingly severe storms, longer droughts and rising oceans were predictions that scientists in the 1980’s warned Congress about. However, one often unrealized effect of climate change is that people rarely ever considered its potential impact on the future generations’ mental health. For context, less than 1% of 54,000 medical research papers that mentioned climate change from 2010-20 also mentioned mental health.
Through decades of aggressive misinformation by fossil fuel companies, many students such as myself have experienced firsthand the consequences of climate change. Factors such as food insecurity from prolonged droughts or economic strains stemming from increasingly powerful natural disasters can and often will induce mental trauma and stress.
From my own experience, I have witnessed the effects of the urban heat island effect in my city of Atlanta, Georgia. Days that could often be classified as mild would feel excessively hot in my neighborhood and surrounding areas. I could often feel the residual heat burning through my shoes from the concrete filled neighborhood.
The increasingly hotter temperature in my area would frequently induce mental stress on the younger me, knowing that my father was working out in the extreme heat as a construction worker. Currently as an Earth Systems major student, climate change is always on the forefront of my mind, be it through hope or fear.
As I reflect on how climate change has impacted my mental health personally, I am compelled to expand my exploration beyond my individual experiences. The impacts of climate change are only going to get more frequent in the near future, so my experience alone is one of many.
Knowing this, I was eager to understand how other Earth Systems students navigated the emotional landscape shaped by our evolving climate. This led me to my meeting with Sky Chen, a senior from Houston, Texas also majoring in Earth Systems.
“What really got me into sustainability was probably when Trump got elected,” Chen said. “Previously, I was obviously aware of the problem posed by climate change, but for most of my life up to that point, Obama had been president.”
Chen had experienced firsthand the impacts of Hurricane Harvey and increasingly frequent storms, where his neighborhood would oftentimes be flooded. These events helped Chen solidify the magnitude of climate change.
When it came to mental health impacts, he remained positive in these situations noting, “But I just kind of take it like, ‘okay, I need to try my best to mitigate this.’”
Shifting focus away from the direct impacts that climate change had on Chen, we talked about how climate skeptics could impact one’s hope. Chen delivered his concerns from the fact that a good amount of people could so easily disregard the accumulation of scientific evidence on anthropogenic climate change.
“I would just say that it makes me less hopeful that we can limit warming to 2 degrees,” Chen said.
However, to retain his hope and optimism in the face of negative factors such as climate skeptics, he adopted a certain philosophy to carry on climate action: “My philosophy has all along been, ‘we do the best we can to combat this problem,’ and some people are going to be deadweights. But that’s just how it is.”
There are so many strains and tensions associated with climate change such as the uncertainty about wanting children in the future, government inaction or financial burdens that losing hope is almost justified.
As a prime example, the media that we view often comes out with disheartening information that makes us lose hope in this battle. So how does one remain optimistic? For Chen, reading the news all at once in a day helps him get information by “looking for general trends” as opposed to “letting each story sink” within him.
Climate change isn’t just an individual problem; we’re all involved and impacted by it. In an international study, scientists found that half of people aged 16 to 25 reported feeling very worried about climate change.
“It’s helpful when you talk to multiple people and remind each other that we all can do something about it,” Chen said.
Although climate change impacts all of our mental health in different and powerful ways, I talked to Chen about perspectives that we as individuals can realize to help cope. Sometimes people try to take action, but these climate events keep happening, leading to those individuals feeling like they have no impact.
“No matter how small something is, if someone’s able to do it and see some kind of impact, then they won’t lose hope easily because they know it’s doable,” Chen said. “The most you can do at the end of the day is look at yourself in the mirror and say that you tried your best to make a positive impact for the world,” he added. “That’s something I think you’ll be proud of if you tried your best to do it.”
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Braylyn To is a junior at Stanford majoring in both physics and earth systems. He is passionate about physics solutions for climate change and enjoys learning/reporting about the direct impacts of climate change.
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