Category: Climate Cares

Children’s mental health must be prioritised at the first Children’s Dialogue at the UN Climate Negotiations

This blog post is written by Dr Alessandro Massazza, United for Global Mental Health, and Dr Omnia El Omrani, Climate Cares Centre, Imperial College London.

No country is sufficiently protecting children and young people’s health, their environment and their futures. Young people under 24 make up 41% of all people alive today. Among them, 89% live in low- and middle-income countries that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. According to Save the Children, a child born in 2020 will be exposed to seven times the number of heatwaves as their grandparents, even if the emission reduction targets set by the 2015 Paris Agreement are met.

Making connections for climate change and mental health

Connecting Climate Minds Global Event recap

The Connecting Climate Minds (CCM) Global Event in Barbados involved 70 in-person participants and more than 600 virtual participants. Together, we celebrated the initiative’s first year of work led by seven regional communities, youth, Indigenous Nations and Peoples, and small farmers and fisher peoples.

At the Global Event:

  • The Connecting Climate Minds Hub was launched – an innovative digital platform designed as a collaborative space for researchers, policymakers, educators, and community groups to share their knowledge, resources, and experiences on the climate-mental health nexus including the CCM outputs. 
  • The global event featured keynote sessions delivered by prominent experts in climate change and mental health, along with the marketplace, regional spotlight sessions, and breakout sessions to discuss the Global Research and Action Agenda.

COP28: Centring Mental Health in the Health Response to Climate Change

Join us on this journey as we recap the highlights of COP28 in the UAE. The Climate Cares Centre team shed light on the profound interconnections between mental health and climate change, and the critical window for shifting from a vicious to a virtuous cycle, enabling people and the planet to thrive. 

The 28th UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) was a turning point for the centring of human health in climate negotiations. Political leaders began to acknowledge climate change as a health emergency, including at COP’s first ‘Health Day’, where more than 140 countries made a historic commitment to the UAE Declaration on Climate and Health, and one billion USD in finance commitments were pledged for climate and health.

Climate Change and Mental Health: Insights from Connecting Climate Minds’ First Regional Dialogues 

As climate change continues to reshape our world, it’s not just landscapes that are transforming; the mental health of communities worldwide is also on the line. Over the past month, Connecting Climate Minds has been uniting global experts, researchers, and stakeholders in the diverse fields relevant to climate change and/or mental health from across the world. These discussions transcend borders, bringing together experts from seven regions of the world: Latin America and the Caribbean; Sub-Saharan Africa; Northern Africa and Western Asia; Central and South-Eastern Asia; Eastern and South-Eastern Asia; Oceania; and Europe and North America. The current field of mental health and climate change are disconnected and siloed, which reflects an urgent need to align research and action at the intersection of these two fields.

The cost of caring: How to support wellbeing in climate careers

Dr Emma Lawrance, Lead Policy Fellow for Mental Health, IGHI and Jessica Newberry Le Vay, Junior Policy Fellow in Climate Change and Health are part of Climate Cares.

In November 2022, we brought discussions about the interconnections between climate change and mental health and wellbeing to COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt – at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference. This was only the second time that mental health has been a focus of COP events, with our COP26 Resilience Hub event the first, and overdue. We built new relationships with others who work in the climate change and mental health space, fostering community and collaboration.