Mental Health Impacts of “Climate Crisis” Messaging

A new study examines climate change messaging, indicating how fear-based approaches harm mental health while positive approaches can better engage people for action. Without questioning the quick, major changes humanity is forcing on the climate with enormous impacts, the study’s results challenge negative framings of “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” “climate breakdown,” and similar phrases. Instead, climate change communication should support mental health for supporting action.

Fear-based messaging

This new paper was published earlier this month in the journal Sustainable Development and was led by Zhaohui Su from Nanjing, China’s Southeast University. Seventeen other authors from eight countries contributed.

They summarized and analyzed published work from the past five years alongside continuing research, focusing on English-language work covering climate change and mental health. The authors identified three patterns emphasizing communication and messaging based on fear.

First, reporting typically highlights negative impacts from climate change. These negative impacts are indisputably real. They do not indicate the entire range of ongoing and expected climate change impacts, nor do they necessarily highlight action that could and should be taken to avert many of the negative impacts.

Second is “information overload.” So much material is disseminated so swiftly that it is hard to keep up. This overload is compounded by misinformation, due to mistakes, misinterpretations, or (for disinformation) deliberate falsehoods. The authors particularly note adverse mental health impacts from messages of “too late and too little” and “climate doomism.”

Third, messaging of and across multiple crises, often termed “polycrisis,” although the paper does not use this word, exacerbates negative mental health impacts. For this point, the authors refer to “natural disasters,” despite disaster research long explaining that the phrase is a misnomer, because disasters do not come from nature. Consequently, not many disasters are caused by climate change. An interesting investigation would be whether or not using the phrase “natural disaster” and misattributing the cause of disasters induces hopelessness, as if nothing could be done to avoid disasters.

Positive and constructive messages

A public event on climate change and health in London, UK.

Source: Ilan Kelman

To assist action, the paper’s authors suggest three clear ways forward for climate change communications.

First, positive messaging should aim to support mental health and to overcome despairing emotions. Focusing on solutions and actions indicates the gains that can be accrued. The authors suggest “hope, joy, and love,” in effect, aiming for eco-inspiration.

Second, personalising messages engages people. Negative climate change impacts and actions to redress them need to be relevant to people, particularly their daily lives, so that people gain directly from acting and see those gains. The authors emphasise this point as reducing “perceived psychological distance” between the message and the recipient.

Third, people-centred approaches support mental health by demonstrating the personal benefits of redressing climate change alongside the straightforwardness of actions. It effectively taps into selfishness and excitement by tailoring messages to what people are interested in and what they can do.

In context

The paper aptly discusses limitations and unknowns. Context matters, such as pre-existing ideologies and presumptions precluding any form of messaging that deviates from them. Disseminating messages depends on conduits, which have their own interests, perhaps commercial or perhaps political. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, “The medium is the message”.

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Context also matters in terms of other messages sent out in parallel to climate change communications. The COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2023 severely impacted mental health, the effects of which linger today. People amid war or genocide, or simply struggling to buy enough food each day, would understandably be less receptive to climate change messages.

The ways forward could also have insisted on evidence-based messages. Positive, personal, and people-centred dissemination might backfire if its content is scientifically indefensible. The paper’s use of “climate mitigation” rather than the correct “climate change mitigation” exemplifies an inaccuracy that can undermine good intentions.

Within this context, the authors might rethink some of the phrases used uncritically in the paper, such as “Unabated, climate change is an existential threat to humanity,” “climate crises,” and “climate catastrophes.” After all, they are very much fear-based.