Action on Climate Change is urgent.
The more we delay ,the more we pay in lives and in money.
-Ban Ki Moon
( Secretary General Of The United Nations).
Climate is fundamental to the understanding of a place. Places with changing seasons provide us certain recreation and economic activities, such as the beginning and ending of the ice fishing season, planting and harvesting times, and tourism to ski areas. Our attachment to places—the environments, traditions, and customs tied to these places—are very deep and part of our identity. Attachment to place is what makes environmental changes and natural disasters particularly distressing.
Effect of Climate Change on Mental Health
Ever since human-caused climate change emerged into public consciousness around the late 1980s, news stories and public awareness campaigns surrounding the topic have predominantly been accompanied.
Yet mounting scientific evidence has led experts to conclude that climate change presents “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”.
This summer’s wild weather is just a warmup for the increasingly frequent instances of extreme weather expected to occur with further climate change. Wide-scaled flooding in kerala,landslides in China; heat, drought, and wildfires in Russia; and record-setting floods and heat waves in the U.S. have left behind death, destruction, and displacement
These catastrophes cause great physical harm, but they also impose a less obvious toll on the human psyche. When a wildfire destroys your home or business, when a flood washes away your crops for the season or your entire neighborhood, when severe drought stresses your family’s daily life, the psychological effects can be devastating. People coping with
severe weather conditions can experience serious mental health symptoms, including posttraumatic stress, depression, and anxiety.
According to Weems, Associate Professor at the University of New Orleans suggests that between 25 and 50 percent of all people exposed to an extreme weather disaster may have some adverse mental health effects, the degree of severity depending on a number of things, including the person’s age, coping capacity, and proximity to the devastation,where he or she lives, occupation, and previous significant interactions with the environment etc.
“When you have one of these massive disasters, the effects are long-range,he said.In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, researchers found no decline in cases of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms even after more than two years. “Even now we have seen a relatively small drop-off in symptoms. This suggests that we will have to respond to future disasters in new ways, that different kinds of interventions are needed three and four years down the road.” Weems added that the current federal disaster response policy makes little provision for long-term mental health treatment.
Way forward
1)Evacuation
Being evacuated from a likely disaster area ahead of time, if that is possible, can help reduce the mental health impacts of severe weather events. To put it simply: “The farther you evacuate, the less likely that your mental health will suffer negatively.”
2) Advance Planning and Preparedness
With global temperatures already on the rise, and further warming virtually certain, climate change is having impacts around the globe. Being prepared can help people cope with the severe weather associated with global warming.
Depending on the type of severe weather, you need to plan how to be safe. Where will family members meet? What needs to be there? Food? Water? Flashlights? How are you going to keep your family together? All of this can be articulated in the plan,”
This kind of preparedness is important to reducing the stress.
Reference
https://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/climate-change-and- mental-health.html
https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/climate/wellbeing.html
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/climate-change-is-a-public-health-emergen cy/
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