Examining the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change Among Young People in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Younger generations have never known a world untouched by climate change. Their lives have been shaped by its alarming scale, speed, and scope, and they are likely to experience increasingly dramatic climate changes throughout their lifetimes. Given the magnitude of this crisis, it isn’t surprising that climate change is associated with adverse mental health outcomes among young people. Although these mental health impacts have long been overlooked, they are now gaining attention, with policy- and decision-makers around the world calling for more research. Responding to these calls, this research used a mixed- and multi-methods approach to examine the extent to which climate change is impacting the mental health of young people (ages 13–34 years old) in Canada. As the evidence base and public discussion on this topic grow, there is an urgent need to analyze related research and news coverage to better understand the scope of climate-mental health risks and how they are communicated to the public, providing insight into how public discourse and policymaking may be influenced and shaped. Therefore, a systematic scoping review of primary research in North America (n=89 articles) and an analysis of Canadian and U.S. media coverage (n=1085 articles) were conducted. Findings from these reviews highlight a clear need for national-level research and discussion on this issue in Canada. Although case study research in Canada has revealed various mental health challenges among young people in regions that are highly sensitive to climate change, we do not know how common these impacts are across the country. This current lack of national data limits our understanding of the scope of the issue and hinders both federal and international policy and decision-making. Thus, a national randomized cross-sectional survey was conducted to examine emotional and mental health impacts from climate change (n=409 young people). Results show that young people in Canada experience a wide range of emotional responses to climate change, with the vast majority reporting at least mild levels of worry or hopelessness. More concerningly, some young people appear to be experiencing deeper, potentially unhealthy levels of despair, including climate anxiety that disrupts daily life and causes them to dwell on their emotions. Together, these three complementary data-generating strategies helped uncover population-level patterns in climate change and mental health research, highlighting the broad and pervasive ways these risks are manifesting among young people. This research addresses a critical gap in a field that has largely focused on physical health by quantifying and characterizing the emotional and mental health impacts of climate change. It has important implications for policies and programs to support the wellbeing and resilience of young people, a population increasingly affected by the long-term consequences of climate change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".