With the stress of a never-ending pandemic, rising political tensions, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the 2020s have been off to an unpromising start for mental health. And according to the most comprehensive report to date on how the changing planet is affecting society, the climate crisis is likely to make it even worse.

The report released this week from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at more than 3,600 pages, provides a sweeping picture of how the world is becoming hotter, sicker, and poorer, putting billions of people in danger. It warns that time is running out not only to address rising emissions, but to adapt to climate change.

“These impacts are happening much faster, much more widespread, and more severe than we had previously thought,” said Sherilee Harper, the lead author of the IPCC report’s chapter on North America and a health professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

The authors spell out how the effects of climate change are linked to stress, trauma, grief, anxiety, and suicide. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as “an atlas of human suffering.” It marks the first time that the panel of top climate scientists has emphasized mental health in their influential reports.

Climate change has already started taking a serious psychological toll, the report shows, whether people are evacuating from a wildfire, abandoning their homes after a flood, or trying to grow crops in unpredictable conditions.

“You look at property damage, or you look at the economy, or you look at any of these climate change impacts that the report covers, and mental health is stressed for all of them,”  Harper said. “It touches everything.”

Read the full article about mental health and climate change by Kate Yoder at Grist.