Absolute heat records were broken in 64 municipalities on July 18, 2022, in France. And the heatwave episode leads, in many countries, especially in Western Europe, to formidable forest fires that firefighters are struggling to contain. Photos of trees burning and health recommendations punctuate the news at the moment.
The heat wave that occurred in mid-July 2022 is the second in barely a month in Europe. The multiplication of these phenomena is a direct consequence of global warming according to scientists, with greenhouse gas emissions increasing in intensity, duration and frequency.
“Regardless of the greenhouse gas emission scenario considered, global warming will continue for at least several decades and will be accompanied by increasingly frequent and intense heat waves.“, especially in France, warned Weather France July 30, 2022. “Without a climate policy, there are 3 out of 4 chances that the annual number of heat wave days will increase by 5 to 25 days at the end of the century depending on the region compared to the 1976-2005 period.“, adds the agency.
In this context, Yousf Bounasr asked the editorial staff of Science and Future, from our Facebook page, what relationship can be made between climate change and psychological health. This is our Question of the Week.
Between eco-anxiety and solastalgia
Faced with climate change, real anxiety can set in. Eco-anxiety is a word coined in 1997 by Véronique Lapaige, Canadian and Belgian teacher-researcher. She observed that individually or collectively, a growing number of people felt unwell and often a need to take responsibility in the face of climate change.
Thus, the eco-anxious develop a concern in the face of the announced ecological disasters: climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, deforestation… This is an anxiety by anticipation, born from the awareness of the short and long-term impacts. long-term climate change. Eco-anxious people feed on the various scientific reports, in particular the IPCC, but also on the observation that events linked to this climate change are already observable.
According to Doctor Alice Desbiolles, public health doctor, epidemiologist and author of the book “Eco-anxiety, living peacefully in a damaged world“, “Eco-anxiety is not a pathology, it’s a state of mind that can make you sick, but most of the time we are faced with an eco-anxiety that we will qualify as adaptive”. For INSERM (National Institute for Health and Medical Research),“it is neither a syndrome nor an official psychiatric diagnosis”.
However, Dr. Desbiolles adds that “It’s a legitimate stress and the whole point is to learn to live with this moral suffering and to overcome it”. She specifies that “sometimes, we can find ourselves faced with pathological eco-anxiety: there, the moral suffering is too great and will require temporary psychological support, and sometimes, this eco-anxiety can also lead to characterized depressive episodes, to burns -out”.
Solastalgia also reflects psychological distress related to human actions on the environment. More precisely, this term translates a malaise in the face of what is already lost when eco-anxiety is a malaise linked to what is to come. These two concerns can be felt together.
TO READ. What is eco-anxiety and twin sister solastalgia?
Towards increased violence?
An American study published in 2013 in the prestigious journal Science also indicated that a warmer climate leads to an increase in violence. “We believe that the effects we have identified are significant enough that we take them seriously and ask ourselves whether what we are doing or not doing today can influence how violent our children’s world will be tomorrow.“, explained during the publication, to AFP, Solomon Hsiang, main author of the study. To reach the conclusion of a link between higher temperatures and increased violence, the scientists had carried out a “meta-study ” covering about sixty works. “Climate change could dramatically amplify human conflict“, worried the researchers.
However, the explanation for such a phenomenon remains unclear, but several theories exist. Heat could, for example, have physiological effects that lead to greater irritability and therefore a greater propensity to react violently.
With AFP
–
