Recognizing Mental Health Impacts in Climate Change Assessments

Climate change affects mental health in various ways, now increasingly documented across health, social science, and environmental research, yet these impacts remain largely absent from climate assessments used to inform integrated transformation pathways.  Empirical studies associate climate-related stressors, such as extreme heat, floods, food insecurity, displacement, and environmental degradation, with adverse mental health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, psychological distress, increased psychiatric hospitalizations, and elevated suicide risk. Evidence also suggests that relatively small increases in temperature, on the order of 1 °C, can negatively affect cognitive performance, decision-making, and emotional regulation, with implications for productivity, learning, and social functioning.

These impacts are unevenly distributed and often more pronounced in rural and peri-urban settings, where climate-sensitive livelihoods, environmental stress, and limited access to mental health services intersect. Certain groups face heightened vulnerability, including individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions, whose symptoms may intensify under repeated climate stress, and pregnant individuals, for whom climate-related stress can affect prenatal mental health with potential long-term consequences for child development. In contexts where health systems are already under-resourced, climate stressors can contribute to prolonged mental health crises and strain institutional capacity well beyond the immediate aftermath of climate events.

Despite this growing evidence base, mental health impacts are rarely treated as climate impacts in their own right within climate change assessments, which continue to prioritize physical health outcomes and economic damages. This narrow framing risks underestimating adaptation needs and overlooking important dimensions of non-economic loss and damage, particularly those related to long-term well-being, recovery, and resilience.

This study argues for a more systematic recognition of mental health in climate impact assessments and outlines a pragmatic pathway to do so that is consistent with existing assessment practices. We suggest a staged approach in which mental health impacts are first explicitly identified and characterized within the climate impact space, alongside physical health and economic damages, drawing on established epidemiological and social science evidence. These impacts can then be incorporated into broader assessment processes through several entry points, including scenario narratives that reflect psychosocial vulnerability and recovery, the expansion of impact categories to include mental health–related non-economic losses, and SSH-informed interpretation of assessment results that considers how mental health shapes adaptive capacity, societal readiness, and long-term resilience.  Recognizing mental health as a climate impact in this way can help make climate assessments more comprehensive, realistic, and equity-aware, thereby improving their relevance for adaptation planning and long-term transformation pathways.