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Climate change threatens mental health via increasing exposure to the social and economic disruptions created by extreme weather and large-scale climatic events, as well as through the anxiety associated with recognising the existential threat posed by the climate crisis. Considering the growing levels of climate change awareness across the world, negative emotions like anxiety and worry about climate-related risks are a potentially pervasive conduit for the adverse impacts of climate change on mental health. In this study, we examined how negative climate-related emotions relate to sleep and mental health among a diverse non-representative sample of individuals recruited from 25 countries, as well as a Norwegian nationally-representative sample. Overall, we found that negative climate-related emotions are positively associated with insomnia symptoms and negatively related to self-rated mental health in most countries. Our findings suggest that climate-related psychological stressors are significantly linked with mental health in many countries and draw attention to the need for cross-disciplinary research aimed at achieving rigorous empirical assessments of the unique challenge posed to mental health by negative emotional responses to climate change.

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Place attachment describes the emotional connection that people hold with a physical space, and such bonds have been shown to be associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, as well as physical and mental well-being. Although a temporal element of place attachment is acknowledged, the exact nature of time’s role in such relationships is yet to be fully understood. The current study addressed this using qualitative interviews with nine long-term residents of an urban centre in Northwest England. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied to explore the underlying mechanisms through which time asserts its influence on place attachment. Analysis developed three interrelated super-ordinate themes: what time brings, accumulated attachment, and time as a dialectic. As time passes, life events, cultural changes, and physical transformation to the environment affect individuals’ interactions with place, and thus their relationship with it. Continued inhabitation leads to an accumulation of emotional salience. Ultimately, time interacts with human memory, offering individuals multiple perspectives through which to make sense of their present environment. Issues may then arise, as memory is heavily influenced by the passing of time. Consequently, present-day perceptions of the place’s past are often viewed through a prism of nostalgia, with implications for the person-place bond.