October 16, 2024

Initiative-funded project seeks to understand impact of climate change on mental health

The continued rise in focus on climate change comes as a result of increasing temperatures, extreme storms and wildfires. Distress experienced as a result of an awareness that climate change underlies these changing weather patterns can be referred to as “climate change distress” (CC-D), which is elevated among young adults and could be linked to adverse health outcomes. Research on CC-D has remained limited though in epidemiological studies due to an absence of a brief measure suitable for large health surveys.

In spring 2023, a team of interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Washington received a Tier 1 Population Health Initiative pilot grant to create a brief measure titled the Climate Distress Questionnaire (CDQ), which hopes to be included in large health surveys and is led by a collaboration of public health professionals and survey administrators.

Sonya Jampel, a study co-investigator and CSTE Applied Epidemiology Fellow with Public Health – Seattle & King County, works with the Climate & Health Equity Initiative in an effort to understand how climate change impacts certain populations of individuals throughout King County.

Jampel explained how mental health tends to be left out of the conversation when it comes to evaluating the impact of climate change on public health, which led to an interdisciplinary collaboration that facilitated the pilot grant from the UW’s Population Health Initiative.

“We were noticing this gap in data on mental health and climate change distress, so we collaborated with some other local and state health departments in Washington and Oregon to look through the literature and see what other people were doing so we could propose a measure,” said Jampel.

“After our initial meetings we ended up submitting a proposed series of survey questions to the Healthy Youth Survey, but we’re excited about this project to help us figure out what questions we want to be asking and how climate change distress is different in youth versus adolescents or young adults and adults,” added Jampel.

Jessica Acolin, lead co-investigator and a postdoctoral scholar in the UW’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, also expressed enthusiasm for collaboration with Public Health – Seattle & King County and emphasized the importance of bringing higher education and public health together.

“We think it’s really important to incorporate [local health department] voices early on to make sure the measure we are developing meets their needs. This is a really important piece of this collaboration because it brings the academic and public health together before developing the measures in order to adapt them,” shared Acolin.

The project’s timeline runs from July 2024 to February 2025 and includes two aims that attempt to create and test the CDQ. The first aim lasts for four months and focuses on the recruitment and collaboration of public health professionals, survey administrators, researchers, clinicians and on-the-ground professionals in creating a CDQ that can be utilized in future epidemiological studies. By November 2024, the project’s team will put the second aim in action through qualitative pre-testing of the CDQ on young adults.

“Young people learn about climate change at a much younger age than people did before, and questions about how they react and how it affects their thoughts about their future and how these translate to mental health outcomes, it’s all evolving,” said Acolin.

“One of the great things that we get a chance to do with this foundational work is to take the time to do this qualitative work and to explore what that experience is as it’s emerging,” shared Acolin. “I can’t say why a measure like the one we’re developing hasn’t happened before, but I think climate change distress among youth and young adults is a newer experience and people are realizing it.”

The project’s measures of success are exclusive to each aim: Aim one’s focus lies in the recruitment of public health professionals, survey administrators, researchers, clinicians and on-the-ground professionals and their ability to propose a CDQ measure, while aim two attempts to receive critical feedback that will determine the success of the CDQ measure developed in aim one.

The hopes for this project are to develop a measure of CC-D that can be utilized in large epidemiological studies and fill the missing gap currently found in studies related to climate change distress. In addition, the repeated use of a succinct CC-D measure may contribute to an expansion of research related to its current health disparities and prevention targets needed, aligning with priorities of the National Institutes of Health.

“We know that climate change disproportionately affects some populations and there are environmental injustices by class, race, geographic area, age and disability,” said Jampel. “We are interested in starting at the first step of designing a data collection tool to understand if there are disparities in experiences of climate change distress and then continuing to collect data and work with communities to design interventions.”

“Climate change and mental health are such pressing issues right now, and our work fits within the ecosystem of lots of work going on in this direction,” concluded Acolin. “These questions that ask how climate change affects health and mental health and understanding what we can do to combat the disparities and associated health outcomes, they’re all so important right now.”

Young adults aged 18-26 who are interested in participating in focus groups to this pilot project’s CDQ can sign up by visiting the research team’s online sign-up form.