Mental health problems induced, in part, by climate change are becoming increasingly common as the world warms, including the number of people experiencing “ecological grief”.
Ecological grief is one of the emotional responses seen in those living with the impacts of climate change-induced extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts or heatwaves.
In addition to crop failures due to extreme weather, individuals can experience ecological grief in response to declining yields and other changes, particularly where this directly impacts their lives and livelihoods.
This is particularly true of those in the global south, who are disproportionately affected by climate change, despite historically contributing less to the problem.
In a recent study of farmers in the Upper West Region of Ghana, I looked at how the grief caused by ecological loss can manifest in multiple ways, including causing mental health and psychosocial problems ranging from emotional distress to anxiety, depression, helplessness, hopelessness and sadness.
This research shows the potential for including ecological grief and other mental health impacts in the strategies of countries – especially those in the global south – looking for ways to adapt to climate change.
What is ecological grief?
As people increasingly live with the impact of climate change, research has tried to identify the impact it has on people’s lives.
For example, people who have been exposed to life-threatening extreme climate events are at a considerable risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Symptoms of this include flashbacks of the event, increased reactivity and avoidance of cues to the memory of the event.
In addition to this, several new concepts for climate change-induced distress have been introduced, to describe the long-term emotional consequences of anticipated or actual environmental changes.
Ecological grief refers to the mourning of ecological losses, including loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes, often shaped by acute or chronic ecological change.
The concept explains grief experienced in response to actual or anticipated losses in the natural world. This mourning of the loss of ecosystems, landscapes, species and ways of life has become a frequent lived experience for people around the world.
In 2018, a study published in Nature provided a conceptual clarification and understanding of climate change-induced ecological grief. It highlighted the implications of climate change-induced ecological loss on the mental health and wellbeing of people, as well as how people respond to ecological change that has both direct and indirect effects on the natural environment.
Ecological grief provides a conceptual understanding of the lived experiences of people who retain close living, working and cultural relationships to the natural environment.
Most of these people depend almost exclusively on the natural environment for livelihood needs, such as smallholder farmers who live in poor communities in the global south.
Research gap
Despite the effects of climate change on people in the global south, there is a dearth of understanding of ecological grief within the context of developing countries.
As such, paying closer attention to climate change-driven ecological grief within the context of developing countries could inform the design of climate change response strategies, decision-making, policies and interventions at the local level.
My current research aims to understand the lived experiences of climate change-induced ecological grief in the Upper West Region, Ghana’s most climate-vulnerable region.
It identifies climate change-induced ecological losses and how farmers in the region emotionally respond to those losses. The work highlights different non-economic experiences of climate change effects, focusing on emotional and mental health dimensions, which remain a relatively unexplored area.
Ecological grief in Ghana
Farmers’ understanding of ecological grief revolves around their emotional response to the loss of their livelihoods. This reaffirms farmers’ strong connection to their environment, on which their livelihoods are predicated.
First, farmers grieve the loss of their crops to extreme climate events, such as floods, droughts, heatwaves and climate-induced pests. The grief associated with the loss of crops has almost become perennial, as these extreme climate events have become more frequent.
In interviews undertaken as part of the research, farmers compared the feeling of losing their crops with the emotional pain of losing a loved one.
Second, farmers grieve the disappearance of their indigenous seeds and genetic resources.
Local seeds have been replaced with drought-resistant seed varieties, which farmers are encouraged to adopt to provide resilience in the face of the increasing impact of climate change.
Interview responses demonstrate that the adoption of the new seeds is causing the loss of farmers’ own seed varieties, which can be freely saved, exchanged and reused yearly. With the adoption of new seed varieties, farmers are losing their genetic resources and the culture associated with it. This is becoming a great source of worry and grief for farmers in the Upper West Region of Ghana, the research shows.
Third, farmers grieve the loss of their traditional ecological knowledge that was passed down to them by previous generations. This knowledge includes their ability to predict weather patterns, know farming seasons, determine soil types, know crop varieties and select seeds, among many other areas.
Without this knowledge system, farmers cannot practice agriculture as they have done in previous generations. The culture, values, norms and beliefs of farmers are tied to their traditional ecological knowledge, which often manifests through practice.
My research suggests that farmers are no longer able to predict weather patterns and farming seasons, an emerging trend that makes them feel as though they have lost their wisdom. This makes them worry.
Another source of grief for farmers is their inability to pass on their traditional ecological knowledge to their children, the research shows. This is because their ecological knowledge is becoming worthless as a result of climate change.
Way forward
My research explored ecological grief, an under-explored area of climate change-induced mental health problems in developing countries.
Indeed, farmers in developing countries are vulnerable to prolonged mental health problems if extreme climate events continue.
Moreover, a lack of alternative livelihoods and access to mental health services greatly increases farmers’ vulnerability to climate change-induced mental health problems.
This is compounded by a social culture that prohibits help-seeking.
Further research within these spaces would enable the design of targeted strategies and the provision of mental health services in rural areas.
The post Guest post: How climate change is causing ‘ecological grief’ for farmers in Ghana appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How climate change is causing ‘ecological grief’ for farmers in Ghana
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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