Climate Change Is Bad for Your Mental Health

Pacific Standard Oct 13, 2018
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• Pacific Standard explores the effect that extreme temperatures brought on by climate change might have on our collective mental well-being: Studies make the link to increased stress and anxiety.

• If there weren’t enough reasons to take action to preserve our environment, psychological health should be added to the list. But will we be able to coordinate efforts in time to make a difference?

• Here’s why we keep ignoring climate change warnings.

The world has only a dozen years to act to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change, according to the latest report from the United Nation’s top climate science panel out Monday. Without rapid and drastic action, climate change will expose hundreds of millions more people to heat waves, sea-level rise, more extreme weather events — and, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, worsened mental-health outcomes.

Previous studies have shown that rising temperatures can disrupt sleep patterns, worsen moods, and increase the risk of suicides, which led lead author Nick Obradovich and his colleagues to wonder if extreme temperatures might also lead to mental-health problems such as stress, depression, or anxiety. To find out, the researchers looked at self-reported mental-health data for some two million United States residents, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2002 and 2012. The team compared health data to meteorological records over the same period to find out how extreme temperatures, gradual warming, and extreme weather events tracked with residents’ self-assessments of mental health.

“Generally what we found was that exposure to hotter temperatures and [more] precipitation increased the reporting of mental-health problems,” says Obradovich, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

Read the full article about why climate change is bad for your mental health by Kate Wheeling at Pacific Standard.

Learning and benchmarking are key steps towards becoming an impact giver. If you are interested in giving with impact on Climate take a look at these selections from Giving Compass.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Cookstoves and Carbon Offsets: The Conundrum

    Carbon offsets have delivered many millions of dollars to finance cookstoves, for better or worse–probably, alas, for worse. Since the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was formed in 2010, so-called clean cookstoves distributed to poor people in the global south have been paid for, in part, with carbon offsets purchased by companies, western governments and private donors. You, for example, can buy carbon offsets generated by cookstoves in Rwanda. But what are you buying? Carbon offsets are strange. They are, in essence, the certified absence of a colorless, odorless gas—CO2—or of other greenhouse gases, like black carbon, that cause climate change. The thing is, it’s hard to know whether a cookstove actually prevents the emissions of CO2 or black carbon. Was the cookstove used as directed? Did it last as long and operate as efficiently as expected? Maybe, but quite likely not. That’s unfortunate for the poor, who get broken or subpar stoves, and for governments or wealthy donors, whose well-intentioned efforts to help go for naught. This is a problem that a small nonprofit called Nexleaf Analytics has begun to solve, by using Internet-of-things technology —low-cost sensors and cloud—to find out whether cookstoves are actually being used as directed. Read the full article about carbon offsets in the cookstove sector by Marc Gunther at Nonprofit Chronicles.

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