Child Mental Health and Climate Change Adaptation

Human-caused climate change is affecting all health now, including children. How do countries address child mental health in their climate change policies? The quick answer is that they do not.

Examining Climate Change Policies

Dr Kathi Zangerl led the new study.

Source: Courtesy of Ilan Kelman

Kathrin E. Zangerl at the University of Heidelberg in Germany created and led a study on this topic, of which I was one author. The study was just published in the journal The Lancet: Child & Adolescent Health. We examined how climate change adaptation policies in 160 countries incorporate all aspects of child health. Not a single country covered direct needs for child mental health. Some mental health and well-being measures could offer indirect support, provided that children are included.

Samoa and Ireland mentioned resources being put into post-disaster mental health services, although nuances are needed when trying to attribute disasters to climate change. Samoa is also seeking to expand its community mental health programmes and services, ensuring that mental health conditions are part of non-communicable disease surveillance. Kiribati, comprising islands thousands of kilometres apart, is enhancing its online mental health services, developing new guidelines for mood-related conditions, and training mental health staff about possible climate change impacts. Still in the Pacific, Fiji mentioned its support for research on climate change’s mental health impacts.

Many other countries offer similar approaches and programmes, not necessarily mentioning climate change yet certainly relevant to this issue. Such measures, being about mental health and well-being more generally, could support children if they are involved. The policies and actions could, therefore, potentially contribute to addressing any aspects related to climate change adaptation and child mental health.

Key Gaps

Yet a clear gap emerges in terms of a few countries incorporating child-focused mental health in health-related national policies and action plans. Children need to contribute actively to developing and implementing these policies, including any direct connection to climate change adaptation and impacts.

Part of involving children means involving their families. Health research highlights how maternal and child healthcare must include mental health in order to achieve the most effective outcomes. There is less work on fathers despite wider evidence on the importance of fathers for a child’s health.

Another area requiring further work relates to primary caregivers who are not parents, alongside roles for wider family and social networks. Much existing research focuses on assumptions of a child having a mother, and sometimes a father, as the core family.

Solastalgia

Back to climate change specifically, youth around the world are expressing eco-anxiety and climate grief. A field has opened up on “solastalgia,” a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to refer to negative emotions and mental health impacts emerging from living through environmental changes to one’s home. This excessive negativity about climate change, aside from requiring provisos to ensure that science is fully accounted for, might be having far more adverse mental health impacts than climate change consequences themselves.

Albrecht and others researching and acting on environmental psychology and ecopsychology prefer evidence-based realism about climate change’s real effects while focusing on real actions: what we can and should do to stop climate change and to respond to its worsening impacts. Mental health and well-being policies for climate change should embrace eco-inspiration and climate hope in order to be scientifically accurate and to support mental health by bringing positivity and activity to our lives.

Then, children will see the world doing better, will contribute to everything that needs to be done, and will take control of their own future.