Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change
Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change
Abstract
Sound mental health – a critical facet of human well-being – has the potential to be undermined by climate change. Few large-scale studies have empirically examined this hypothesis. Here we show that short-term exposure to more extreme weather, multiyear warming, and tropical cyclone exposure each associate with worsened mental health. To do so, we couple meteorological and climatic data with reported mental health difficulties drawn from nearly two million randomly sampled US residents between 2002 and 2012. We find that shifting from monthly temperatures between 25°C and 30°C to >30°C increases the probability of mental health difficulties by 0.5 percentage points, that 1°C of five-year warming associates with a two percentage point increase in prevalence of mental health issues, and that exposure to Hurricane Katrina associates with a four percentage point increase in this metric. Our analyses provide added quantitative support for the conclusion that environmental stressors produced by climate change pose threats to human mental health.
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