Measuring climate-related ecological distress in real time, mapping its social-determinants, and designing scalable interventions that strengthen resilience — including a $1.8M province-wide intervention with the BC Ministry of Health and a national automated monitoring system.
The mental-health consequences of climate change — eco-anxiety, solastalgia, climate grief, displacement-related distress, and trauma from acute events like the 2021 BC heat dome and successive wildfire seasons — have moved from a niche concern to a population-scale public-health problem. My research treats climate distress not as pathology but as a reasonable response to an unfolding emergency, and asks how the health system, the education system, and civil society can support people to act and to cope.
The program has three threads: (1) Measurement & surveillance — psychometric work on climate-anxiety scales (including gender-sensitive measurement), socio-demographic mapping of climate distress in BC, and the development of an Automated Climate-Change Distress Monitoring System funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund that uses social-media signals to track distress in near real time; (2) Intervention — the $1.8M BC Ministry of Health contract to design and implement a province-wide, multi-component intervention for climate-related ecological distress, complemented by CIHR catalyst grants on climate resilience among older adults and community connections after climate events; and (3) Education & capacity-building — the Climate Emotions Course, co-created with experts and delivered through the Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance (MHCCA), where I sit on the leadership.
The work is intentionally translational. Provincial governments and frontline emergency-response teams need tools to support climate-affected communities now — not in a decade. My team builds the evidence and the tools at the same time.
The mental-health burden of climate change is not distributed by accident. It lands most heavily on low-income communities, Indigenous peoples, outdoor and frontline workers, and others whose social position leaves them more exposed and less protected. Framing climate emotions as individual fragility hides this pattern and shifts responsibility onto the people least able to change their own exposure.
My research treats climate distress as a reasonable response to a real and unequally shared threat, and locates it in the natural and social environment rather than in personal weakness. Built with affected communities, the work moves from individualized coping toward equity-oriented, social-ecological responses: measuring who is harmed, and building the public supports that protect them.
The case below shows that pattern in the data. When successive extreme weather events hit British Columbia in 2021, the psychological burden did not fall evenly, and it grew most among the populations already least protected.
2021 gave British Columbia a year of compounding climate shocks: a record-breaking heat dome, a severe wildfire season, and catastrophic November flooding. We surveyed 1,179 residents across three waves through that year to ask a deceptively simple question. As the events stacked up, whose climate-change anxiety rose, and whose stayed flat?
Anxiety was socially patterned from the outset. Higher levels were concentrated among women and among residents who were uncertain about whether to have children, while older and higher-income residents reported lower anxiety. Material security, in other words, appeared to buffer some of the distress that the climate emergency produced in others.
The disparity grew over the year. As the 2021 disasters compounded, climate-change anxiety climbed fastest among groups already carrying heavier social and historical burdens: Indigenous participants, non-binary residents, and people with a high-school education or less. The same weather produced unequal psychological costs, and repeated exposure deepened the divide rather than levelling it.
This is the empirical case for treating climate distress as a question of health equity rather than individual temperament. A generic, one-size-fits-all mental-health response would miss exactly the populations whose anxiety is rising. It points instead toward interventions tailored to the social position of those most exposed and least protected, which is the orientation that anchors this entire program of work.
Card KG, Sharma A, Bratu A, et al. “Socio-Demographic Disparities in Climate Change Anxiety Among British Columbians Impacted by Successive Extreme Weather Events.” The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 2025. Read the study →
A $1.8M, province-wide, multi-component intervention for climate-related ecological distress — the first of its kind in Canada. Designed and led as PI in partnership with the BC Ministry of Health (2024–2025).
A national system that combines social-media signals and survey data to track climate-related distress in near real time. Funded through the New Frontiers in Research Fund.
An expert-co-created curriculum that teaches practitioners, educators, and the public to recognize, validate, and respond to climate emotions. Delivered through the Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance.
climate-emotions-course.vercel.appA repeated cross-sectional study of climate-anxiety, childrearing intentions, workforce impacts, and gendered measurement among British Columbians impacted by successive extreme-weather events.
A CIHR Catalyst Grant (PI, 2025–2026) exploring the role of Climate Resilience Groups in improving mental health among older adults in Canada.
Psychometric and qualitative work with Canadian adolescents on climate emotions, coping, and the mental-health impacts of climate change — embedded within the WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study.
Cumulative funding for this program: $4.1M across 14 awards, anchored by the BC Ministry of Health and CIHR.
Among 33 publications in this area. The full filterable record is on the publications page.
Climate-distress findings have been covered on CTV Morning Live, CBC News Network, CBC Radio (Early Edition, BC Today), Euronews, and in dozens of regional print outlets — from the 2021 BC heat dome through subsequent wildfire and flood seasons.
Social connection is one of the strongest protective factors against climate distress — and a mechanism in our climate-resilience interventions.
See the social-connection programClimate-driven distress is one of several intersecting crises that converge on the same priority populations — substance use, infectious disease, and structural inequities.
See the syndemics program