The fear of a storm, after a flood, has a very specific sound. It arrives before the real rain, when the sky closes and someone looks at the manhole in front of the house like one looks at a door left open at night. There are those who check the weather every half hour, those who sleep with their documents ready, those who smell mud even when the mud has been washed away months ago. After the fires, another type of memory remains: the dry air, the black on the trunks, the rooms emptied quickly, the things chosen in ten minutes because everything else could burn. After the extreme heat there remains a duller tiredness, the one that crushes you on the bed, irritates you, takes away your sleep, patience, clarity.
The climate crisis is often described like this: broken embankments, submerged houses, burning forests, temperature graphs, evacuated towns. It is the visible part, the one that enters the photos and inspections. The other remains with people: fear, mourning, disorientation, anxiety, sense of loss, a fatigue that continues when the cameras have already changed location. A scientific work published in PLOS Climate reconstructs precisely this less photographed area of the climate crisis: the effects on mental health pass through three intertwined paths, that is, acute trauma from extreme events, slow environmental degradation and anticipatory anxiety for future threats.
After the water and fire, there remains mold, debt, temporary homes and a lot of fear
A climate disaster always has a brutal first phase. You run away, you call someone, you look for a relative, you save an animal, you take a bag, you watch a road become a torrent. In those moments the body works in emergency. Then comes the longer phase, less suited to the titles: returning home, throwing away furniture, calling insurance companies, waiting for refreshments, figuring out where to sleep, going back to work if the job still exists. The mind stays on. Even when the immediate danger seems closed.
The collected research links floods, cyclones, fires and extreme heat to acute stress reactions, post-traumatic disorder, anxiety and depression. Symptoms can last months or years, especially when trauma is compounded by displacement, economic loss and broken social networks. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, nearly half of low-income survivors showed significant symptoms of mental distress; After the 2013 floods in Uttarakhand, northern India, 66.7% of affected children and adolescents reported psychosocial difficulties related to the disaster, with the loss of shelter and play spaces associated with anxiety, insecurity, grief and uncertainty.
In Italy this part of the discussion does not need much translation: just think of the houses emptied with the bucket, the garages full of mud, the elderly watching the water rise from the ground floor, the shops reopened with the smell of damp still in the walls. Every time the public count starts from roads, bridges, embankments, fields, cars, companies. It’s useful, of course. But inside those same houses another accounting accumulates: insomnia, irritability, fear at the first weather alert, children who ask if it will happen again, adults who answer without believing it too much.
Climate resilience is often imagined as a question of works, sensors, water pumps, emergency funds. Everything necessary. However, a plan that only involves concrete leaves out half the scene. After the water comes the mold, the forms, the loans, the missed shifts, the rooms to be redone, the memories thrown in the dumpster. And people arrive who continue to work because they have to, even when they still have the noise of the flood inside.
The burden grows where health and psychological services are already uncovered. In low- and middle-income countries, the treatment gap is enormous: fewer than one in twenty-seven people with major depression receive adequate treatment, compared to less than one in five in high-income countries. A climate disaster makes everything worse because it interrupts clinics, medicines, schools, transport, family networks. Climatic mental suffering follows an unfair map: it reaches everywhere, crushing the most those who have the least space to escape.
Solastalgia: when the place stays the same, but it no longer feels like home
There are more subtle climatic wounds: a coast eaten away year after year. A field made salty by advancing water. A drought that changes harvests, debts, table conversations. A glacier that retreats and leaves a mountain different from the one remembered by the grandparents. A forest that turns from refuge into fuel. Here the trauma takes place at a slow, almost domestic pace. Get into habits before getting into bulletins.
To describe this discomfort there is a still uncommon word: solastalgia. It indicates the discomfort of those who remain in their place while that place deteriorates. The geographical home is still there, the emotional home is losing pieces. It is a form of nostalgia experienced without leaving, a loss consumed on the spot. The term is used to describe the link between slow environmental changes and psychological suffering, because for many communities the landscape coincides with work, identity, memory, language, rituals, family. When the territory changes, the way of being in the world also changes.
A review of 29 studies published between 2004 and 2018 found a recurring pattern: drought, sea ice decline, and other gradual changes are linked to emotional and existential distress; in 83% of the studies this connection emerges explicitly. The effects are strongest in indigenous communities, where landscape loss often overlaps with historical trauma, inequalities and structural fragility.
Read from here, solastalgia stops seeming like a conference word. It is the fisherman who finds the sea changed, the farmer who watches a season become unreliable, who lives in the mountains and sees snow, work and tourism disappear together, who lives near a river and from a certain year onwards begins to consider it a threat. The landscape continues to be outside the window. Except that inside that window something changes.
Then there is climate anxiety, which comes before the event. It mainly affects children, adolescents and young adults, that is, people who have grown up with a future described as a promise and a present that every day brings images of fires, record heat, floods, species in crisis, slow governments. In a large international survey, 59% of young people interviewed said they were very or extremely worried about climate change; 45% reported consequences in daily life, including sleep and concentration.
Dismissing it as a generational pose is convenient. Also quite shortsighted. In many cases this anxiety concerns very concrete choices: where to live, whether to have children, what job to imagine, how much to trust institutions, what relationship to build with an area perceived as fragile. The fear of the future, when the future is told every day like a room that gets warmer, ends up occupying the present. And the present, by dint of being busy, shrinks.
Psychologists, schools and local services are also needed in climate plans
In public health documents, the link between climate change and mental health is now written in black and white: the climate worsens social, environmental and economic conditions that are already weighing on people’s heads, while in many countries services remain too few compared to real needs. The World Health Organization also reminds us: when the way we live, work, take care of ourselves, move around and raise children changes, something inside also changes.
Preparing for the changing climate means going beyond evacuation plans, expansion tanks, raised embankments, risk maps. Everything useful, everything necessary. But after the emergency, there remain general practitioners faced with an anxiety that has become unmanageable, pediatricians with children who are afraid of the rain, teachers with displaced pupils, civil protection workers who arrive when the panic is still hot, social workers who know fragile families even before the flood. Climate resilience also passes through there: people prepared to read the damage when the damage has stopped making noise.
The work insists precisely on this: mental health must be treated as a central part of climate adaptation. Trained staff, dedicated funds, community services, post-disaster psychological support, safe spaces for children and adolescents, paths for those who lose their homes or jobs, attention to lonely elderly people, farmers, informal workers, coastal communities and already vulnerable people must be provided. The breakdown often comes later, when you have to go back to shopping, pay the bills, send the children to school, sleep in a room that still smells damp.
The climate crisis enters the fields, the rivers, the woods, the urban plans, the nights, the bodies that wake up at the first thunder, the anger of those who have shoveled the same cellar twice, the child who loses the yard, the elderly person who fears the heat, the community that sees its landscape become a stranger. A raised embankment is needed. A pump that works is useful. A well done alert is useful. Then someone has to stay with those who continue to tremble when the water has already gone.
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