Learning about eco-anxiety, eco-grief and climate grief

Amidst the increase of dramatic floods, wildfires, droughts, natural disasters and more, eco–grief is on the rise. Based on research and reflections from the Climate Psychology Alliance, as the reality of the climate and biodiversity crises unfold, our mental health is increasingly at risk. Relatedly, terms such as eco-anxiety and eco-grief are becoming more common. Even without climate change, the global mental health situation is already challenging. Over the past few years, and more specifically during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some people believe that mental health appears to be receiving the attention and action it deserves. Building on WHO’s Mental health and climate change policy brief, between 1970 and 2020, climate – related hazards have increased, with 50% of all events occurring since 2003 and nearly 5 billion people having been affected. As climate change has increasingly stronger and longer-lasting impacts on people, this can directly and indirectly affect their mental health and psychosocial well-being.

In line with these global signals and trends on the linkages between mental health and climate, the Accelerator Lab set out to assess this space from a global standpoint. Our findings revealed that more broadly within BOS, an emerging line of work is beginning to appear on eco-anxiety, eco-grief and climate grief. For instance, in the Pacific, the University of Queensland human geography project worked with persons in the Cook Islands, Marshall Islands and Vanuatu on assessing experiences of grief and loss related to climate change, often the result of compromised health, culture and sense of place. When translating some of these findings at our local level in the Eastern Caribbean, we began to wonder if communities, and more specifically, youth, were experiencing similar sentiments due to their noted concern for the state of the environment and resulting evident activism in the space: turning  stories of doom and gloom, anxiety and grief into advocacy, hope and optimism.  

Understanding the Eastern Caribbean youth perspective on mental health and the environment 

To further gauge youth sentiment towards the environment, the Accelerator Lab collaborated with U-Report Barbados, an initiative of UNICEF and the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment in Barbados, on the 'Mental Health and Climate Change’ poll.  Launched last year in recognition of World Mental Health Day 2022 via an SMS polling tool, over 350+ youth in Barbados responded to the survey, which was the first of its kind from U-Report to link mental health with the natural environment. This comes at a critical point in time as 63% of the Caribbean population is under 30, resulting in important connections between youth perceptions of the environment and emerging job markets and skills in the blue-green Future of Work (FOW).

Here’s what we learnt: Out of 378 respondents, over half were concerned or very concerned about the current state of the natural environment. When asked about concerns on the future state of the environment, numbers greatly increased, with 93% of all respondents being at least somewhat concerned. As we delved deeper into our analysis of the poll’s results, most respondents in the 35+ category selected “All of the above” (80%) when identifying the impacts of climate change they were most anxious about experiencing, including beach erosion, diseases and flooding. Among younger groups, however, intense hurricanes and storms ranked highest alongside droughts and water shortages.  In trying to understand some of these potential signals, many thoughts come to mind: Is this because some impacts of climate change are more visible than others? Are youth perhaps more directly influenced by images of storms, hurricanes and droughts seen through social media?