OP-ED: The Climate Crisis is a Mental Health Crisis. Building Smart-Surface Public Spaces is an Easy Prescription

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By Greg Kats, Howard Frumkin, and Georges C. Benjamin · Amsterdam News · August 15, 2024

Co-Authored by Howard Frumkin, Nature and Health co-founder and Steering Committee member

A high rise building with a green/planted roof
Credit: Lucas Gallone, Unsplash

As the Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 closed with much fanfare and a first-time “transition away” from fossil fuels commitment that’s drawing skeptics, here’s what we do know: The planet we live on and need survival for is getting hotter. The hotter it’s getting, as even the COP28 admits, the less livable it becomes.

However, what the COP28 conveniently omitted—among other essential conversations—are the mental health consequences boiling rapidly from a hotter world. We also know that a hotter planet means we’re dealing with hotter surfaces. Surfaces determine heat, and plenty of cities in the United States were overheating this summer, along with other cities around the globe that are still overheating because they take no winter breaks.

We must explore and respond to the urgent mental health aspects of that. In the U.S., for example, even as 90% of the population can access air conditioning, hotter temperatures translate into more people staying indoors versus enjoying the company of others.

We Need a National Institute of Climate Change and Health

Written by

 Howard Frumkin and Richard J. Jackson · Scientific American · November 22, 2020

Howard is a Nature and Health researcher and Steering Committee member

Credit: Tiffany Dang

The climate catastrophes of 2020—wildfires, hurricanes, oppressive heat—left no doubt that climate change threatens health. And the COVID-19 pandemic left no doubt that preparing for predictable health challenges is essential to preventing needless suffering and dying. The two lessons are linked. We know climate change will increasingly affect health. Research shows, for example, that global temperature changes could lead to more heat-related deaths and deaths from diseases such as dengue fever and cholera that spread via insects and water. We urgently need to prepare. But we face critical knowledge gaps in areas such as diagnosis and prevention.

We recommend a solution: the immediate creation of a new unit at the National Institutes of Health—the National Institute of Climate Change and Health. With a budget of more than $40 billion, the NIH is the world’s largest, best-funded health research institution. Yet it devotes a measly $9 million annually to research directly related to climate change and health, according to its own tally.