QS GEN

The silent storm: The climate crisis’ impact on student mental health

Posted on December 13, 2023December 13, 2023 by Laura Lightfinch

‘Climate anxiety’ has gained increasing traction in the media, but the relationship between climate change and mental health is a relatively new study, especially in higher education. According to a new report from Student Minds, the UK’s student mental health charity, the impact of the climate crisis on students’ mental health and wellbeing is significant.

The October 2023 report reveals that from the sample of students surveyed, 71 percent are quite or very concerned about climate change, while 90 percent say it impacts their mental health and wellbeing in the preceding four weeks.

This is unsurprising, given the urgency to find solutions across every discipline to mitigate the impacts of climate change on both the environment and humanity.

Jade Mayum studies environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, which is ranked second in the QS World University Rankings: Sustainability 2024. Alongside her studies, Mayum works for the university’s Student Environmental Resource Centre on the Nature Education and Wellbeing Together programme.

When asked if she feels the pressure to shape the world and have an impact on the climate crisis, Mayum says: “Definitely. In class, I learn about many problems facing the world and the further threat we face if more action isn’t taken and it can feel overwhelming. I often wonder how I can fix it all.”

There is collective anxiety among her peers to figure out how to make an impact while trying to succeed in their modules and assignments, according to Mayum. “None of us want to leave and have wasted the opportunity we had at university, so there is a definite pressure to solve every problem we can. It’s impossible, really.”

A strong desire to make a difference

In the Student Minds report, students widely expressed a desire to make a positive contribution to tackling climate change but often felt like they didn’t know where to start.

“We can no longer ignore that climate change is happening and we can’t ignore the impacts it’s having on mental health either,” says Jenny Smith, policy manager for Student Minds and author of the report. “It’s understandable and very normal to have an emotional reaction to what is ultimately an existential threat to humanity.

“The earlier we deal with it, the better, but it’s about how we do that safely in an emotional and psychological sense. How do we make students feel encouraged and hopeful about the positive impact they can have? How do we provide them with skills and tactics to be able to make a difference as well as supporting them to cope with the negative feelings associated with climate change?”

Data from the QS International Student Survey 2023, which captures the motivations and expectations of 116,000 students across 194 countries, illustrates that prospective students are increasingly looking at universities’ sustainability and social justice efforts in their decision-making.

Now that students are looking to universities for sustainable leadership, the question is how universities are helping students hold onto their ambitions and feel inspired while the climate crisis continues to have a negative impact on their mental health.

Beyond education, students need direction in how to make change

Matthew Lawson is the Senior SRS Learning, Teaching and Reporting Manager in the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability (SRS) at the University of Edinburgh, which was ranked 15th in the QS World University Rankings: Sustainability 2024.

Lawson is responsible for embedding sustainability and social justice into the academic curriculum and student experience, which includes all undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

“We understand that every student will be impacted by climate change and the wider environmental crises we face,” Lawson says. “We also know there is a need for stronger professional development that not only helps students to understand the issues facing our world but helps them to see where they can take action.”

For Lawson, the key to supporting students in managing their studies and mental health is developing resilience. “Students and graduates have the power to shape global politics as they take their skills into their respective fields and into leadership positions, even influencing policy,” he says.

“We must inspire students and give them hope in a rapidly changing world with various challenges. From giving students the opportunity to talk about how the climate crisis is impacting their feelings to giving them opportunities to fail forward and develop competencies that might not always work out, but in the safe space of a university.”

The power of student-led organisations

At Uppsala University in Sweden, ranked 11th place in the QS World University Rankings: Sustainability 2024, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies enables students to request courses on topics in the field of environment, development and sustainability that transcend what is available in the curriculum.

It is an interdisciplinary student-initiated hub for education which director, Mikael Höök, says is increasingly popular. “There has been a definite increase in students wanting to learn about topics like climate psychology, food production and climate change leadership,” he says.

“The centre has created a strong atmosphere for fostering and creating longer-term engagement in the climate crisis and environmental issues. We have students who take one of our courses and come back to work as a course coordinator with us. We’ve had students work with us at the centre before graduating to work in a sustainability division within the government or in industry.

“It’s important to actively support students in making change and student-driven education is a strong chord in providing that support – enabling students to decide what is important, work with others across various disciplines and engage in tangible change with local communities,” says Höök.

In fact, according to the Student Minds report, 66 percent believe that universities should work with student leaders and student unions to run more student-led sustainability initiatives around the climate crisis.

Jacqueline Canchola-Martinez studies conservation and resource studies with geography at UC Berkeley, working alongside Mayum in the Student Environmental Resource Centre (SERC). Canchola-Martinez is from the Central Valley in California, where her community is already feeling the effects of environmental injustice.

Student-led groups have provided Canchola-Martinez with a community of people who care about the climate as much as she does. “Organisations like SERC and the Students of Color Environmental Collective that I’m part of make me feel supported,” she says. “I feel surrounded by people who understand environmental justice and have a mutual understanding of the urgency we face.”

“It helps me to see that it’s not all doom and gloom. There are people actively looking for solutions and it makes me feel like I’m a part of the solution.”

Do student health services have a role to play in supporting climate anxiety?
At Uppsala University, the student health service is prepared to support students with anxiety and depression that comes from a range of lived experiences, whether it’s climate change, financial anxiety or other anxieties.

The university recently offered a lecture by a climate psychologist who spoke on the impact of climate anxiety and how to deal with it. Ulrika Svalfors, Head of Student Health Services at Uppsala University, says: “Students do mention climate concerns in conversation with the health service, but climate anxiety doesn’t seem to make students lose their ability to mentalise.

“Instead, they seem to be able to transform their climate anxiety into action, something that does not happen to the same extent when it comes to other types of anxiety and worry.”

For Smith, policy manager at Student Minds, it’s also important that we don’t medicalise anxiety and depression caused by the climate crisis. “The fact that some students are finding it difficult is a normal reaction. It shouldn’t be something that is treated but that students are provided with the tools to manage their feelings around it.”

She adds: “Learning about climate change and environmental issues can be overwhelming, so we need to provide strong morale so that students can see hope and opportunities to engage in environmental efforts. We want them to go out into the world and have the capacity to contribute to our societal issues as professionals.

“Their voices matter and it’s important that their feelings and their needs are taken seriously.”

EdUHK Scholar co-authors article published in Nature Climate Change

Posted on July 15, 2021 by eduhk

A team of leading climate social scientists, including a chair professor at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), argues that influential studies that attempt to quantify different countries’ “fair shares” of climate action have put forward a biased and oversimplified view of what is primarily a political and ethical discussion.

The Perspective piece, “Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement,” published in the pre-eminent academic journal Nature Climate Change, comes as the world’s governments are expected to release new national plans for climate action ahead of climate negotiations later this year in Glasgow, Scotland, and defend them as “fair and ambitious”.

One of the article’s co-authors is Professor Paul G. Harris, Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at EdUHK, who has spent three decades conducting research and writing about climate justice and governance.

The piece evaluates a selection of recent effort-sharing studies to determine whether they are explicit about the ethical choices underlying their analyses. Reviewing sixteen studies that quantify equitable effort sharing between countries under the Paris Agreement, the authors find that nearly two-thirds (10 studies) present themselves as neutral or value-free, despite being limited to a small and biased subset of ethical perspectives on effort-sharing that tend to favour wealthier countries.

“It is widely assumed that climate change is a technical or political problem. It is more accurate to conceive of it as a normative problem in which disagreements about what is just, fair and equitable crowd out co-operation on social and technological solutions,” said Professor Harris.

Sivan Kartha, Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute added, “Studies that incorrectly purport to be neutral and objective are not just misleading, they can even be harmful. In this case, they can set unrealistic expectations about what countries might be expected to contribute to a global climate effort. Even if it’s not intentional, one can imagine the problems caused by a body of literature with a consistent bias toward wealthier and against poorer countries.”

In particular, the ‘grandfathering’ of emissions, where countries argue their status as high emitters is a justification for continued high emissions, should not be included in equity assessments of global climate action. This is a key source of the systematic bias in favour of wealthier, higher emitting countries.

Other studies claim objectivity by averaging a spectrum of equity approaches, commonly choosing a subset that excludes important ethical concepts. For instance, when many analyses quantify a country’s capacity to allocate resources to a global climate effort, they routinely treat a dollar earned by a poor citizen as wholly equivalent to a dollar earned by a rich citizen.

Many indicators ranking nations’ efforts to address climate change “say they’re about equity, but there’s still a systematic bias in favour of the biggest historical polluters. As we review efforts in the ‘global stocktake’ of the Paris Agreement, these kinds of indicators must be transparent. Otherwise, they are anti-equity,” said Timmons Roberts, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at Brown University and Director of the Climate Social Science Network.

“Studies should be explicit about the ethical and moral implications of their underlying assumptions, and equity assessments of countries’ climate action must be based on ethically defensible principles, such as responsibility, capacity and need,” said Dr Kate Dooley, Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study.

Professor Harris added: “This article helps to reinforce what we already know from other aspects of life: reliance on statistical indicators can result in potentially unjust outcomes. It’s more important than ever to view the ethical challenges of climate change holistically and qualitatively.”

The authors propose new guidelines that emphasise transparency in communicating the ethical underpinnings of assessments of climate action and suggest guidelines for developing policy-relevant — but not ethically neutral — equity research, which includes studies of equitable distribution of climate efforts should not claim value-neutrality; analysis needs to ensure that the losses of those who are potentially marginalised remain clearly visible, and analytical work should aim to inform rather than supplant the political process.

EdUHK Scholar’s recently published study covers humans’ historical adaptation to climate change

Posted on June 18, 2021June 25, 2021 by eduhk

A research team including a scholar from The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) has given a new perspective into human adaptation to climate change. The study’s findings were recently published in the prestigious academic journal Nature.

Climate change is an important issue which has been extensively discussed over the past years. While many experts believe that climate change has had a profound impact on human history, to date there has been little discussion about how humans have reacted to these altering circumstances.

With this in mind, a research team of 18 experts from different countries and disciplines undertook a study to understand the interplay between what they have called “History of Climate and Society”. The team sought to examine the role of human resilience to climate change in shaping human history and the complex connection between them.

Led by Dr Dagomar Degroot from Georgetown University, the research team comprised 18 scholars from the Germany, Poland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, mainland China and Hong Kong. Their expertise covers geography, archaeology, history to paleoclimatology. Among the team was Dr Pei Qing, Assistant Professor of the Department of Social Sciences at EdUHK, who contributed to revising the design and framework of the entire study.

To understand the effect of climate change on human history, the team selected different societies across continents for case analysis covering two climatic eras: the Late Antique Little Ice Age around the 6th century; and the Little Ice Age from the 13th century to the 19th century. Among these cases, Dr Pei also contributed to the Asia case study – the rise of the Jianzhou Jurchens during the early 17th century – in collaboration with Dr Cui Jianxin from the Northwest Institute of Historical Environment and Socio-Economic Development of Shaanxi Normal University.

The pair found that although both the Jianzhou Jurchens and the Ming Dynasty were affected by drought through monsoon failure, the former thrived and survived because of their higher mobility, thanks to their tradition of hunting and gathering. This enabled them to adapt through encroaching on cultivated land to the south and controlling trade networks.

The interdisciplinary team also looked into how, in the 6thcentury, people in the Middle East under Roman rule made use of the humid climate to cultivate and expand their territory; how, in 13thcentury, the governments of Bologna and Siena used strategies like food regulations to deal with natural disasters and minimise famine and mortality; and how, in the 17th century, Dutch sailors took advantage of precipitation and prevailing winds to defend themselves against Spanish invasion. These cases showed how human resilience to climate change could help explain the rise and fall of different political regimes or dynasties in human history.

Dr Pei said, “Many studies in the past have demonstrated the impact of historical climate change on human societies, particularly on a long-term and large spatial scale. However, our study provides a new perspective for academic research, indicating that the communities could effectively respond to the challenges of climate change.”

According to Dr Pei, historical cases also tell us that successful adaptation to climate change usually depends on the ability of a community to control or capitalise resources.

Dr Pei pointed out that this study provides insights for the public to reflect upon the resilience of different peoples against climate change. “When a country acts to deal with changing climatic conditions, its measures may bring a negative influence to other countries. When formulating climate actions or related policies, countries should not only consider their own benefits, but also their neighbours, and even the whole world, so as to pursue and realise the equitable principle of combatting climate change.”

The study also uncovered several common criteria of historical societies that coped well with climate change, including strong trade networks, high mobility and the capacity to learn from mistakes. “Human societies’ evolving resilience and historical successes have given us confidence in dealing with global warming. However, we should also carefully consider our relationship with nature and learn the lessons from our history,” Dr Pei said, adding that he hoped this study would provide a solid academic foundation for the scholars to better explore the relationship between historical climate change and human societies in the future.

The original publication can be found in Nature.