Summary: This blog unpacks the mental health consequences of climate change from a social justice lens.
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Climate change’s impact on humanity, and in turn its effect on mental health, is multifaceted. It influences health and mortality, livelihoods, infrastructure, food security, migration, resource availability, and many other factors. Climate chang e is linked to the development and worsening of mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, substance use, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Discourse around climate change, and mitigation and adaptation responses, needs to, therefore, address its mental health consequences too.
This year’s World Day for Social Justice was on the theme “Renewed Commitment to Social Development and Social Justice,” inspired by the Doha Political Declaration adopted at the 2025 Second World Summit for Social Development. The Declaration emphasises three priorities: eliminating poverty, ensuring decent work for all, and promoting social inclusion. It affirms the right to the highest attainable standard of health, including mental health, as part of universal health coverage, and commits to urgent climate action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Paris Agreement. Given the close links between mental health and climate change, this blog explores how global and regional disparities shape mental health outcomes and resilience in the face of climate challenges.
The North-South disparity
The impacts of climate change are not uniformly distributed across the globe, with a significant disparity between the Global North and Global South. This imbalance is particularly pronounced within the context of mental health. Historical injustices and ongoing inequalities exacerbate vulnerabilities in already marginalised communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights that between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people, predominantly in the Global South, live in highly climate-change susceptible contexts.
The current disparities in climate change and mental health vulnerability are rooted in historical power dynamics, primarily colonialism and unequal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. European colonial powers exploited resources from the Global South to fuel their industrialisation and economic growth. This extractive system laid the groundwork for what is now described as climate colonialism. Formerly colonised regions continue to bear the environmental and health burdens, including mental health, of carbon-intensive development from the past. The result is disrupted social systems and economic dependencies that limit their capacity to adapt to ecological changes.
The effects of climate change on mental health are inherently social in nature, shaped by the lived experiences of vulnerable communities that grapple with longstanding structural inequalities. Today, the Global South experiences a disproportionate share of climate-related disasters, such as droughts, floods, and extreme weather events, which impact mental health.
Communities in the Global South frequently face climate-induced trauma due to direct exposure to extreme weather events, leading to displacement and loss of homes and livelihoods, to name a few. Marginalised communities within the Global South bear a heavier burden due to intersecting vulnerabilities. Compounding these challenges is the disproportionate mental health care gap in many Global South nations.
India’s overlapping crises
In India, some groups have historically been vulnerable to systemic neglect, oppression, and exploitation, factors that further exacerbate their vulnerability in the face of climate change.
For instance, people from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA) communities, who are subject to inequity, social exclusion, and discrimination, are also severely affected by the climate crisis. In 2022, the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) published a study on the effect of droughts on the lives of Dalit and Adivasi communities in Marathwada, a region known for high rates of farmer suicides. 75% of participants were dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. The study reported a rising trend of substance use issues and depression due to droughts, with almost half of the participants reporting high or extremely high levels of hopelessness as a result. A study that assessed the link between climate change and suicides among farmers over three decades deduced that over 59,000 suicides among this population could be linked to global warming due to declining crop yields.
Indigenous populations (referred to as Adivasis in India), traditionally have close ties to forests. In the wake of development and climate-induced changes, they also face increased challenges of displacement, disruption of livelihoods, and erosion of cultural practices and knowledge.
Gender inequality is also inextricably linked to the climate crisis. Globally, women are more susceptible to climate-change induced unemployment, food insecurity, and health challenges. Moreover, climate change has been found to increase the risk of gender-based violence, such as physical violence and sexual exploitation. In the study by NCDHR, several of the women participants reported an increase in violence due to drought-induced stress faced by their abusers.
Therefore, climate change not only creates new challenges for the most marginalised communities but further exacerbates pre-existing inequities. Moreover, when people have multiple overlapping vulnerabilities, the threat to mental health is further magnified, necessitating an intersectional approach to addressing the psychosocial effects of climate change.
In the coming weeks, the Keshav Desiraju IMHO will release an issue brief on the mental health effects of climate change in the Indian context, with a focus on the most vulnerable population, including people in climate-dependent occupations, indigenous people, people from marginalised genders and sexualities, disadvantaged-caste communities, people with disabilities, and children and older populations. The mental health consequences of climate change are inevitable. The World Social Justice Day calls upon us to reflect on the historical disparities that continue to have cross-regional and intergenerational repercussions on those excluded and neglected in the social development discourse.
Efforts to address these global challenges, therefore, require a commitment to social inclusion and international cooperation, as espoused in the Doha Political Declaration.
