New Study on the Psychological Impacts of Climate Change - Climate Action
New research by the American Psychological Association (APA) investigates the interface between psychology and climate change.
The report aims to determine psychology’s contributions to understanding and addressing global climate change and place the psychological dimensions of climate change.
The APA finds that: “Human response to climate change blurs the distinction typically found between responses to natural and technological disasters.”
The study divides the human psychological effects into two categories: first is direct mental-health injuries associated with extreme weather, natural disasters and degraded environment, such as drought. The second are indirect impacts, such as anxiety and uncertainty “which may cause heat-related violence, conflicts over resources, migrations, dislocations and chronic environmental-stress.”
Paul Stern, Professor at the National Research Council said: “Psychological contributions to limiting climate change will come not from trying to change people’s attitudes; but from helping to make low-carbon technologies more attractive and user-friendly; economic incentives more transparent and easier to use and information more actionable and relevant to the people who need it.”
The APA report suggests that humans cannot relate their actions to the long-term and in some cases ambiguous, consequences of climate change. Consequently, humans do not know how to react.
The research considers the human causes, consequences and responses to climate change and then links them with how climate change alters human cognitive, motivational, interpersonal, and organisational responses and processes.
The report notes: “Psychology is essential to understanding the human causes and consequences of climate change.”
According to Thomas J. Doherty, a professor at the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education, climate change, unlike other crises, evokes a very different human response. He says: “Although all of these potential [climate change] impacts cannot be described with full clarity, the cumulative and interacting psychosocial effects of may well be profound.”
He continues to describe how, even in the absence of direct impacts, Heat, extreme weather-events, and increased competition for scarce environmental resources, on top of pre-existing inequalities and disproportionate impacts among groups and nations, can result in increasing stress and anxiety.
“Anticipation and concern about the threat of climate change may erode quality of life and threaten mental health,” he adds.
It says that the cause of confusion relates to human reaction to disasters: “Altruistic or community-supportive responses are associated with natural disasters, whereas uncertainty and divisiveness are associated with technological disasters.”
Because climate change is a mixture of technological and natural crises, human are incapable of grasping the subject, cognitively or emotionally.
The article says that climate change adaptation partly extends beyond making physical and structural adjustments to environmental changes. It argues that adaptation should apply at the emotional level to organizations and communities. This can be done through threat and response appraisals, emotion management and cognitive reframing.
Link to article here