Abstract
Climate change represents a growing threat to global mental health, generating traumatic stress exposures directly through climate-related disasters and indirectly through social networks and pervasive media coverage. This paper provides an overview of the symposium “The Mental Health Effects of Climate Change Across Diverse Global Settings,” presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, which examined psychological responses to climate change across varied sociocultural and geopolitical contexts. The symposium presented findings from four studies. First, research conducted in a representative sample of Lake County, California, residents (N = 813) exposed to catastrophic wildfires investigated associations among climate change anxiety, anticipatory climate disaster stress, and disaster preparedness. Second, a probability-based representative U.S. sample (N = 4,356) was leveraged to examine the association between climate change worry and mental health within the context of concurrent cascading collective stressors, with constructs from social and health psychology evaluated as moderating factors. Third, a community-based study in Samoa estimated how rising temperatures and extreme heat influenced mental health symptoms among children over time (N = 429, age 10–13 years). Fourth, survey data from young adults in Ukraine (N = 235) explored the interrelationships among climate change anxiety, war-related fears, and perceived ecological catastrophe threats, highlighting the importance of evaluating climate-related distress within conditions of ongoing trauma. These studies are used to illustrate broader themes within the current field of climate change and mental health literature. We discuss methodological considerations, clinical implications, and key directions for future inquiry.