Climate Change and Children's Mental Health: A Developmental Perspective

Abstract

Climate change is a major global public-health challenge that will have wide-ranging impacts on human psychological health and well-being. Children and adolescents are at particular risk because of their rapidly developing brain, vulnerability to disease, and limited capacity to avoid or adapt to threats and impacts. They are also more likely to worry about climate change than any other age group. Drawing on a developmental life-course perspective, we show that climate-change-related threats can additively, interactively, and cumulatively increase psychopathology risk from conception onward; that these effects are already occurring; and that they constitute an important threat to healthy human development worldwide. We then argue that monitoring, measuring, and mitigating these risks is a matter of social justice and a crucial long-term investment in developmental and mental health sciences. We conclude with a discussion of conceptual and measurement challenges and outline research priorities going forward.

Keywords: administrative data; birth cohort; climate change; developmental psychopathology; disasters; global warming; inequality; long term; psychiatry.

Fig. 1.

The effect of timing of adaptation and prevention on mental-health vulnerability in the context of climate change. Mental-health vulnerability increases in a nonlinear way through exposures that operate with additive, interactive, and cumulative effects (e.g., extreme weather events, heat exposure, worry about climate change). At the same time, plasticity decreases, and risk of exposures to new threats rises with time and because of unmitigated climate change (green-yellow triangle and yellow-orange triangle). Adaptation and prevention efforts (e.g., effective disaster-response planning, climate-change education) that begin early are more successful at reducing mental-health risk (low-risk trajectory) compared with efforts that begin in adolescence or adulthood (high-risk trajectory), especially for vulnerable populations. Adapted under Creative Commons license from Baird et al. (2017) and with permission from Hanson and Gluckman (2014).

Fig. 2.

Examples of climate-change-related threats to mental health drawn from the empirical literature. This simplified model shows that climate-change-related exposures can begin before birth (in utero) and have cascading effects across development. Stressors that are severe and protracted and occur early in development typically have larger detrimental effects on development. This is because stressors can operate with additive, interactive, and cumulative effects to increase psychopathology risk both contemporaneously and across time. For climate-change-related risks pertaining to adult mental health, including the dynamic interplay between them, see Berry et al. (2018). For a review of factors linked to healthy child development, see O’Connell et al. (2009). Note that although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates “with high confidence” that there will be a further 1.5 °C increase in average global surface temperatures between 2030 and 2050, predicting future risk embodies inherent uncertainties. Consequently, under different future climate-change scenarios, the importance of specific risks described here may vary, and much will depend on the capacity to mitigate, modify, and adapt to known and emerging risks.