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Climate change is altering environments and societies in ways that affect what it is to be human. Psychosocial theories of well-being explain how people’s feelings and functions depend on the way they relate to and are enabled and constrained by their environmental and social circumstances. Here we focus on a major body of evidence that shows how these circumstances are increasingly being affected by climate change in direct and indirect ways.

We provide a survey of recent developments in research that shows how climate change affects human well-being and will increasingly do so. These developments are based on well-established framings that underpin psychosocial descriptions of human well-being. We offer a model of how well-being may be affected by climate change and use this as a framework to structure our survey of the social science research on human experiences of climate change.

The analysis here draws on social psychology and applied social science research on climate risks that uses diverse methods ranging from epidemiological investigations to economic assessments to ethnographic studies on sense making and place1,2,3,4. Many studies are implicit about the nature of well-being, focusing on elements that are self-evidently part of the overall picture, such as individual health, nutrition and the absence or presence of physical risks. Many climate risk assessments recognize the limited nature of climate goals and raise concerns about narrow conceptions of material well-being5. This concern about the omission of well-being from the objectives and scope of climate policy is reflected in wider political debates. The Sustainable Development Goals, for example, are explicit that health and well-being for all at every stage of life (SDG3) is an overarching goal of policy. Diverse proposals of alternative measures of desirable policy objectives, from happiness to resilient communities, suggest at their core that human well-being could and should be a central objective of climate change science and policy.

Here we therefore explicitly focus on long-established models of human well-being that expand the scope of climate science and policy to include more than the material and physical dimensions of climate change6. In this way we explain how the direct impacts of climate change, information about climate risks, and climate change policies and projects can all drive changes in people’s proximate environmental and social circumstances in ways that affect their health, safety, place, self and belonging.

Dimensions of well-being

Well-being is feeling and functioning well, including experiencing positive emotions, positive relationships and the social freedoms and opportunities to realize the potential of individuals7. It is a concept shared by many social and behavioural sciences, but it is defined, theorized and measured differently across the disciplines8,9. In the approach taken here, well-being includes subjective dimensions associated with affect and cognition as well as objective elements associated with the ecological, material and social circumstances of individuals and groups10. The subjective dimensions of well-being are a key concern of the health sciences, which tend to treat well-being as synonymous with mental and physical health and privilege physiological and psychological processes over social factors in explanatory models and measures. Economics and other social sciences, by contrast, principally treat well-being as synonymous with financial security and standard of living, and hence privilege objective outcome measures over subjective experiences. Our encompassing concept of well-being also recognizes the critical role of environmental conditions and places (spaces and identities that are culturally constructed) as shaping collective well-being, in a manner consistent with studies of well-being from the environmental and geographical sciences (for example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment11 and others12) and applied social psychology13. Well-being is thus a process that is “actively constituted through the interplay of personal, social, and environmental processes”14.

There are diverse person-centred frameworks that seek to characterize the dimensions of well-being. Many of these share the idea, most influentially proposed by Maslow15, that there are universal human needs whose fulfilment determines the extent to which people feel and function well16. Complementary ways of judging well-being include those that focus on the ability of individuals to determine their own destiny through meeting the psychological needs of autonomy, competence to live well and relatedness to others17,18.

A needs-based framework to explicate the dimensions of well-being is often used in ecological and geographical research (including in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) and in research on climate change19,20. A person-centred understanding of well-being, however, tends to focus on intrinsic and extrinsic factors that impact an individual’s fundamental needs—that is, understanding an individual’s behaviour and well-being through their experiences of intrinsic individual traits such as age, gender and disease and extrinsic external factors such as weather, rewards and a sense of belonging. We suggest that climate change impacts, adaptations and policies are also experienced and understood in terms of collective understanding and relational traits—that is, within and between communities, places and social contexts. Indeed, climate change in its essence requires group-based and collective responses21.

Here we adopt a similar approach, building on the framework of Graham et al.22, for example, to explain the lived values at risk from climate change as demonstrative of the components of well-being (Fig. 1). Drawing on the idea that there are basic psychological needs that underpin human behaviour, cognition and overall well-being, we suggest that well-being is constituted as health, safety, place, self and belonging. These dimensions comprehensively capture the interplay between climate change and well-being, in a manner comparable to the many other studies that adopt similar need- and value-based frameworks23,24. In addition to incorporating basic psychological needs, however, this framework moves beyond a person-centred approach and towards an active process that reflects both individual and wider social experiences, attitudes and goals by examining intergroup relations, intragroup processes and the reciprocal relationship between the two, to understand how well-being is impacted both within and between group change and stability. In other words, the consequences of climate change and responses to it affect the well-being of individuals (drawing on basic needs perceptions) within their wider societal groups (drawing on group-based theories—that is, the social identity approach25,26). We thus provide a more holistic approach that explores the nexus between the well-being of individuals and the context of the group—an important distinction given that both the consequences and drivers of climate change are necessarily influenced and experienced by individuals, collective groups and society as a whole.

Fig. 1: Conceptual framework.
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Material climate impacts, information and policy responses to climate change affect the dimensions of well-being.

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The framework in Fig. 1 provides a heuristic to help explain how material, information and policy drivers of change affect well-being. Well-being is more than mental and physical health, though illness and injury can limit functioning in many social and environmental contexts, and extreme feelings such as anxiety and depression indicate low levels of well-being. The need-based components of well-being that we outline here include the psychosocial determinants of mental health, such as self-understanding, identity formation, social relationships, worldview and the psychological processes that connect people and places27.

Pathways to affecting well-being

Inferring from research in the social sciences on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation, we distinguish three broad pathways by which climate change affects well-being (Fig. 1). First, and most obviously, climate change alters the material circumstances in which people live, including the infrastructure and ecosystems through which people access goods and services such as clean air, education, energy, family and friends, food, health care, housing, water and work. Second, information about present or future climate change impacts conveyed via data, documents, electronic media, prices, signs and symbols can alter people’s aspirations, hopes, identities and fears. Finally, climate change policy responses that seek either mitigation and adaptation and may use various instruments including finance, moral suasion, taxation and regulation can change social relations and material environments in ways that affect well-being.

These three elements of material impacts, information and policy responses are a well-established inclusive typology and frame much knowledge and research on responding to climate change. They are comprehensively described in reports of Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they frame the national adaptation plans and reports of many countries, including the Climate Change Risk Assessment of the United Kingdom28. Furthermore, they are interrelated and iterative: the experience of climate impacts, for example, gives rise to expectations of future impacts and ideas about policy responses, which, when institutionalized, generate new information about risks and policy responses independent of but reinforced by further impacts from changes in climate29.

These three interrelated drivers can each impact health, safety, place, self and belonging in diverse ways, many of which are nuanced and arise at the intersection of the material, social and subjective processes that shape an individual’s feelings and functions. The impacts of climate change on well-being therefore vary greatly across different cultural, ecological and social contexts including, for example, the extent to which a society is highly individualistic or collectivist, the degrees to which livelihoods depend on specific ecosystems, and the norms and institutions by which an individual’s status is determined.

Consequences for well-being

There is extensive evidence of the impact on dimensions of well-being from both experiencing climate impacts and living with risk and adaptation interventions, as illustrated in Table 1. This evidence is often implicit in specific studies or piecemeal in nature. The evidence highlighted in Table 1 shows how the material consequences of climate impacts, the information provided on climate risks, and policy drivers and specific interventions have diverse outcomes on the five highlighted elements of well-being. These consequences are often unforeseen or unplanned and lead to resistance and social conflict over how best to deal with climate risks. Each of these three pathways to well-being outcomes is now summarized.

Table 1 Examples of evidence for the consequences of material, information and policy implications of climate change on five core dimensions of well-being
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Material impacts of climate change

Climate change has direct as well as indirect material impacts on peoples’ physical and mental health. For example, extreme heat events were directly responsible for 345,000 heat-related deaths worldwide in 201930, and annually in the past decade, more than 25 million people were severely affected or displaced by weather-related extreme events. Studies also show how climate change can impact well-being indirectly through a number of stressors associated with natural disasters. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the incidence of mental health illness and psychopathologies doubled in Louisiana as a result of peoples’ exposure to the destruction of the built environment and their perception of threats to life and personal safety31.

Extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, which now have a discernible climate change fingerprint, have substantial short-term and long-term economic costs. These include direct financial costs from disaster relief and recovery as well as macro-economic costs from loss of productive capital, reduced tax revenues and other dimensions32,33. Climate change also impacts health by disrupting the ecosystem-based livelihoods of those most reliant on natural resources for goods and services, including increasing the likelihood of falling into chronic poverty for marginalized populations34. For instance, the loss of sea ice in the Arctic has already diminished the routes that give seasonal access to traditional foods to the Inuit people of Canada, posing nutritional problems to populations that have high incidences of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease35. There is also growing evidence that access to health services is becoming increasingly onerous in least-developed countries where vector-borne diseases such as Zika virus, malaria and dengue are on the rise as a result of climate change, resulting in an added human and financial burden on vulnerable health care systems36.

Land loss entails a concomitant loss of access to financial resources among subsistence and agricultural-based populations such as smallholder farmers37. This economic instability is compounded by other climate risks and non-climatic stressors, resulting in reduced access to basic services such as education, public goods and social programmes38,39. Such basic services constitute an important dimension of human security that is intrinsic to the well-being of whole communities, particularly in rural settings and among low-income urban households. Furthermore, there is evidence of links between environmental change and types of violent conflict such as social unrest around food insecurity and urban violence, though the patterns and causation are unresolved40,41,42. Still, physical, emotional and psychological safety remains a core element of well-being that is materially undermined by climate change, especially in regions where rapid sea-level rise might make entire areas uninhabitable, posing a direct threat to human security and peoples’ livelihoods43,44.

There is also ample evidence that climate change impinges on individuals’ sense of place—the emotional and cognitive attachment of people to physical spaces invested with cultural meanings and social values. Place attachment is central to human well-being as well as an enabler of climate change adaptation, making displacement a counterproductive adaptation option45. In Fiji, the climate-related relocation of entire communities has been shown to sever people’s connections to their ancestral land, which is in and of itself a source of well-being through continuity between past, present and future46. This predicament is found among Indigenous peoples and farmers for whom land is key to well-being47, although the role of place attachment and the importance of land are probably universal. A review of 117 studies on land tenure security interventions worldwide showed that higher land tenure security corresponds to higher levels of well-being48. Sense of place is also important in terms of anchoring people to locales of cultural significance. Thus, in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions where the loss of ice carries the loss of culturally and spiritually important places, there is a direct threat to the autonomy, sovereignty and freedom that emanate from the special relationships the Inuit have with their environment35,49. These examples demonstrate how climate change has consequences for well-being, and indeed perceived health, through physical spaces that have meaning and value for individuals50. Furthermore, the examples demonstrate how such aspects of well-being are inherently relational and generate values and interactions that are themselves socially negotiated in places and evolve over time51.

Sense of self is also negatively impacted by the material aspects of climate change. Self-efficacy and positive emotions are intrinsic parts of what is often defined as the good life, a people-centred concept of well-being that is now enshrined in the legislation of several countries such as Bhutan, Bolivia and Ecuador52. Environmental changes are associated with negative emotions (sometimes defined as ecological grief or eco-anxiety) that have demonstrated adverse effects on peoples’ sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. Examples of findings on eco-anxiety are given in Table 1. They illustrate that such anxiety has been observed where people are disempowered through, for example, the loss of traditional livelihoods and environmental knowledge among Indigenous populations53,54.

Identity, social status and the sense of belonging that people experience through connectedness to others within communities are all affected by material drivers of climate change. A recent systematic review of more than 100 studies assessing climate-related intangible damage found that the loss of identity from climate stressors is more likely to be a concern in upper-middle-income and high-income countries than in lower-income ones, probably because more material issues take precedence over identity in the latter55. The loss of social cohesion and sense of identity that follows climate-induced migration is well documented56. Social relationships are critical to the well-being of individuals, families and communities, and for many this connectedness involves both human and non-human elements, meaning that the well-being of one is linked to that of the others, creating a sense of stewardship that extends to the environment57,58. For example, in Ouvéa (New Caledonia), coastal erosion is perceived as a hazard for the spiritual realm, a perception that threatens the social status of the Kanaky people, who see themselves as custodians of that realm59.

Information about climate risks

As well as affecting well-being through changes in ecosystems and the built environment, climate change brings powerful ideas about the future that are conveyed through scientific publications, diverse forms of media and word of mouth and that are expressed in discourses, maps and images. There is a growing body of research showing how such information about the future affects people’s well-being in both detrimental and positive ways.

It is widely assumed that greater levels of certainty, quantification and communication of risk will stimulate effective adaptation60. Yet the evidence on whether providing more information about climate risks leads to adaptive behaviour and investments is mixed61. For example, even with respect to heatwave health alerts, research shows that extreme heat early warning systems have limited effect on household and individual responses that reduce mortality62,63. And some studies show that information about climate risks can increase levels of anxiety and distress, including for populations in Australia, Tuvalu and the United States64,65,66.

Information about future climate risks may undermine investments in the sustainability of places and cause people to consider migration that they might otherwise have avoided, and it can thus disrupt the social cohesion and place attachment elements of well-being. Paprocki describes a process of anticipatory ruination in Bangladesh67, where donors and governments implement shrimp aquaculture as a climate change adaptation strategy even though this action degrades environments and undermines community cohesion and the sustainability of places to which people are attached. Similar ineffective response measures have been observed in communities in many other countries, including Ecuador, Nepal, Nigeria and Vietnam68,69,70. More positively, there is also considerable evidence that framings of places as being at risk from climate change can stimulate collective action in ways that boost community cohesion and adaptation actions71,72,73.

In terms of people’s senses of self, information about climate risks can affect self-efficacy in positive and negative ways. Wamsler and Bristow, for example, report on findings that the majority of their sampled climate change policymakers judge that climate change impacts are primarily detrimental to individuals’ state of mind74. Several studies suggest that dramatic messages about future climate impacts can decrease feelings of self-efficacy, whereas information about future opportunities and behavioural changes can increase it75,76. Climate change education programmes have been shown to increase people’s feelings of self-efficacy in the face of climate change and so presumably can help to avert the sometimes-deleterious effects of climate change information on well-being77,78.

The identity dimension of well-being can also be affected by climate change information in diverse ways. Farbotko and colleagues56 describe the way information about climate change is altering the sense of belonging of some Tuvaluans to be focused less on local communities and more on transnational networks of kin. Media and scientific framings of communities as being vulnerable to climate change can change how affected people identify, with evidence suggesting that this stimulates a greater sense of belonging and action on adaptation that counteracts the otherwise negative psychosocial effects of stigma79,80,81,82. There is also some evidence that the geographies of identities can expand in response to climate change, as people increasingly see common cause with otherwise distant others83,84.

Climate change policy responses

There is well-documented growth in adaptation policies and strategies in response to climate change: they range from new and amended physical infrastructure to reducing exposure to climate risks through land use planning and moving communities and populations out of harm’s way. For these challenges, there is a recognition that climate change often impacts public as well as private assets and hence policy interventions are necessary to retain access to public goods and promote social opportunities85,86. Many climate change policies are incorporated into national adaptation plans and the national-level risk assessments carried out by various countries. Such growth demonstrates that information catalyses policy, though such national responses are highly varied, and their effectiveness is assumed more than it is demonstrated87.

Policies and interventions that seek to deal with climate risks themselves can have both planned and unforeseen consequences for well-being, as highlighted in the examples in Table 1. And not all adaptations are themselves sustainable or well thought through—the potential for maladaptive responses to climate risks is high88,89. The greatest sources of maladaptations are the twin challenges of unforeseen consequences of acting and the capture of adaptation benefits by vested interests to maintain the status quo.

Climate adaptation interventions often focus on reducing risk to infrastructure while ignoring potential benefits and costs to well-being90. Evidence from flood adaptation interventions, for example, shows that professionals designing such interventions in Ireland, Ghana and the United Kingdom acknowledge the impacts of climate change on well-being but rarely integrate them into policy and planning. Decision makers that implement and design interventions to reduce flood risk have been shown to be oriented towards engineering solutions91 and to downplay experiential and lay knowledge on living with risk92. There has been well-documented community resistance to coastal defence infrastructure in Clontarf, Ireland, because of perceived loss of access to nature, loss of identity and loss of sense of place.

Settlements and places subject to persistent risks, such as drought or inundation, challenge the ability to sustain populations at risk. In such places, planned relocations (also referred to as managed retreat or resettlement) are an increasingly necessary adaptation intervention93. Such interventions, while reducing physical risks, have widely been shown to have detrimental consequences for the well-being of those involved94,95. Key findings from documented relocations show that the agency of those involved and the legitimacy of the process significantly affect well-being outcomes. When Indigenous communities in Alaska were consulted about moving whole settlements, for example, respect for rights and traditions generated positive outcomes and legitimacy for the policies96.

Many resilience-oriented and holistic adaptation responses have the potential to bring about multiple benefits, including to multiple dimensions of well-being. Nature-based infrastructure, sustainable urban drainage and active travel solutions for transport have all been shown to yield multiple benefits for individual health and other aspects of well-being97.

Implications for climate science and policy

Here we have reviewed the growing evidence of the ways in which climate change affects human well-being. It is forcing changes in ecosystems and the built environment that cascade into deleterious impacts on well-being. Information about climate change intended to stimulate action on mitigation and adaptation can have both positive and negative effects on well-being: it is not clearly driving individual adaptations to protect well-being, given that such behaviours are a function of multiple social and ecological factors, and amplifying messages on dangers does not overcome this dilemma but rather risks increasing anxiety and stigma. Instead, information about solutions may promote well-being by increasing individual senses of self-efficacy and propensity to act collectively.

Climate policies can do much to arrest the risks that climate change poses to well-being, and well-designed and well-implemented policies can deliver multiple co-benefits that could lead to net improvements in well-being. Examples of steps in this direction are Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index98, the Alternative Indicators of Well-Being for Melanesia99 and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Conceptual Framework100. Box 1 highlights principles for what could and should be measured in terms of well-being and climate risks.

Climate adaptation strategies, from United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) articles and processes to the National Adaptation Plans of many governments, seek to promote resilience to climate change. There is some evidence that pursuing resilient societies may come at the expense of well-being in particular circumstances101. The benefits of risk reduction and the promotion of adaptive capacity, for example, have been shown to benefit those sectors of society that have the competence to capture benefits, thus skewing the risk towards more marginalized communities and places. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that climate-resilient development is feasible, citing evidence on “clean energy generation, healthy diets from sustainable food systems, appropriate urban planning and transport, universal health coverage and social protection” and “universal water and energy access” as specific strategies that unambiguously promote well-being as well as making economies and places more resilient102.

This analysis of the effects of climate change on well-being has important implications for climate change policy and science. Most of the objectives of climate policy are implicitly or explicitly about protecting sectors and systems that are loosely coupled to well-being and that are rarely equally beneficial for the well-being of all people. For example, the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC (Article 2) refers to the need to prevent harms to ecosystems, food production and economic development, and many national climate change policies refer to similar high-level goals. But it is well understood that the relationship between ecosystem conservation and well-being is contingent on mechanisms for access and inclusion103, that food production is only one factor in hunger and malnutrition and that economic development does not necessarily lead to enhanced well-being104. Many food-oriented interventions have excluded Traditional Owners from ecosystems, enhanced food production in ways that increase prices or sustained economic activities that concentrate profits and marginalize workers.

Well-being seems to have been forgotten as a climate policy goal, despite increasing recognition from governments globally of well-being as a central objective of good governance. Well-being-oriented budgets for Canada and New Zealand in 2021, for example, both highlight health and social solidarity as explicit goals and advocate for systematic surveillance of appropriate metrics105. The Well-Being Economy Alliance of countries use advances in well-being metrics to advocate for a Well-Being Economy Policy Design that should be used to evaluate every major policy area106.

There is, however, a small but growing body of policy-related activity that recognizes well-being as an explicit goal of climate change adaptation policy. For example, in their 2020 Communication on Adaptation to the UNFCCC, the government of the Marshall Islands declared “security, well-being, identity, self-determination, human rights, and survival” (p. 3) as key policy goals107. The emerging issue of loss and damage in the climate regime is also driving recognition that well-being is at risk from climate change. The UNFCCC identifies “non-economic” losses “that are not easily quantifiable in economic terms, such as … degraded health, … loss or degradation of territory, cultural heritage, Indigenous knowledge, societal and cultural identity”108. But there are no operational definitions or measures of such non-economic losses, and the UNFCCC working group processes are currently devoid of a single method or definition of loss and damage that recognizes well-being.

There is thus a strong case for recognizing well-being as an end for all climate change policies. Indeed, such recognition of well-being may, we argue, be key to moving beyond climate change policies that seek to preserve the status quo through incremental ad hoc adjustments. Well-being goals are the pathway to responses that are legitimate and that transform social and ecological systems in ways that arrest environmental change and enhance sustainability more widely for all people. For researchers, then, a key task is to enhance our understanding of connections so that the effects of climate change, information and policies on well-being are better understood. This would include the development of robust and meaningful measures for inclusion in the monitoring and evaluation of policies and measures, so that the effects of climate change responses on well-being can be tracked in a consistent and meaningful way, and adjustments and improvements can be enhanced.