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Climate change’s mental health impacts are reported as being increasingly evident yet are hard to track.

The barriers to attributing mental health impacts to climate change include inadequate data.

While exploring an indicator is a useful scientific task, we can act now to support people’s mental health.

Human-caused climate change is now affecting everyone around the world. Its health impacts are being tracked, focusing on physical health. Tracking climate change’s mental health impacts is far trickier. No long-term, global indicator has yet proven to be robust.

Physical health and mental health are inextricably linked, suggesting prospects for seeking physical health outcomes based in mental health conditions affected by human-caused climate change. The reverse can also be examined: mental health outcomes emerging from physical health impacts. One significant hurdle is ensuring attribution from a specific climate change trend through to physical health outcomes and then to mental health conditions—or vice versa.

Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes are becoming stronger while declining in numbers due to human-caused climate change. Where wind and flood risk are not reduced prior to a hurricane, a disaster can result, with people injured and killed, their homes flattened, and lives upended. Being injured or having friends and family killed or injured, as well as disruption to life, livelihood, and home, can certainly lead to depression, anxiety, stress, and more.

The first attribution challenge is that no hurricane needs to produce a disaster. The key lies in reducing wind and flood risk before a hurricane. If people could afford to do so, and have the knowledge and impetus, then they could survive hurricanes with little damage or with swift reconstruction,........

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