Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change
Name
10953.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
930.51 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5eb8b0c31eb70f1d809bbe0b4e77e8ef
Author(s)
Obradovich, Nicholas
Migliorini, Robyn
Paulus, Martin P.
Rahwan, Iyad
Date Issued
October 2018
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Obradovich, Nick et al. "Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, 43 (August 2018): 10953-10958 © 2018 National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Sound mental health-a critical facet of human wellbeing-has the potential to be undermined by climate change. Few largescale 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 2 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% points, that 1°C of 5-year warming associates with a 2% point increase in the prevalence of mental health issues, and that exposure to Hurricane Katrina associates with a 4% 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801528115
