Building resilience to the mental health impacts of climate change in rural Australia
Climate anxiety and the mental health and wellbeing impacts of extreme weather-related events are of growing concern globally. In Australia, rural communities in particular are dealing with unprecedented drought, fires and floods every few weeks. The mental health and wellbeing impacts of such climate change induced events are numerous. However, little is known about what promotes the resilience of rural communities to these impacts.
The problem
Changes in the climate—including increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather-related events—affect health. The mental health and wellbeing effects include everything from depression to suicidality, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, emotional distress and exacerbation of existing acute mental illnesses.
In addition, the broad anxiety, distress, loss of ontological security, and disruptions to identity and connections to place caused by climate change have been popularly labelled as ‘eco-anxiety’, ‘climate anxiety’, and ‘pre-traumatic stress’—amongst other terms.
To date the literature on the mental health impacts of climate change has focused on how individuals respond. Therapeutic interventions generally also focus on pathologizing climate anxiety, and viewing it as an individual’s problem or challenge, rather than viewing climate anxiety as a natural human response to a collective crisis. Such approaches also often miss the wider context and shared experience of climate change, for example the shared trauma of a community experiencing an extreme weather-related event or the shared sense of existential threat that climate change can provoke.
Some populations are significantly more at risk. Of particular relevance in Australia are rural communities, where climate impacts threaten to exacerbate the health and social disadvantage already experienced in rural locations in comparison to urban ones.
The study
This paper presents insights from an empirical, qualitative study which collected data from online workshops with groups of rural Australians. The study explored what participants perceived to be effective at building resilience to the mental health impacts of climate change, and the necessary components of success for community resilience-building.
Findings
Participants described a wide range of activities, programs and initiatives they perceived as building resilience. They prioritized the need for three types of community action:
- the provision of general community-led support
- community-focused climate action, including inclusive and democratic resilience and adaptation planning, and
- collective politically-focused climate action.
Study participants described how community-led collective action and planning, which strengthens social and relational capital, engenders feelings of belonging and increases informal social connectedness. In turn this helps address the mental health and wellbeing impacts of climate change, while simultaneously supporting communities to prepare for those impacts.
The study illustrates that the design of strategies to mitigate the mental health and wellbeing risks from climate change may benefit from a move beyond an individual health focus to community-led and implemented collective actions that build community networks.