Scientists warn that a failure to reverse rising carbon pollution levels will see Australia’s inherently moody climate become even more volatile. With inaction or delay on pollution comes a sharp rise in the frequency, intensity and extent of heatwaves, bushfires and drought, as well as more torrential downpours, and tropical storms with increasing ferocity.2
The damage caused by a changing climate is not just physical. Recent experience shows extreme weather events also pose a serious risk to public health, including mental health and community wellbeing, with serious flow-on consequences for the economy and wider society.3 ……….
· Following a severe weather event, a significant part of the community—as many as one in five4—will suffer the debilitating effects of extreme stress, emotional injury and despair. Unabated, a more hostile climate will spell a substantial rise in the incidence of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression — all at great personal suffering and, consequently, social and economic cost.
· The emotional and psychological toll of disasters can linger for months, even years, affecting whole families, the capacity for people to work and the wellbeing of the community. Higher rates of drug and alcohol misuse, violence, family dissolution, and suicide are more likely to follow more extreme weather events. Evidence is beginning to emerge that drought and heat waves lead to higher rates of self-harm and suicide, as much as 8 per cent5 higher.
· Mental illness is already the second largest contributor to the disease burden in Australia. In any given year, one in five Australians suffers from a mental disorder of some kind, potentially making millions of people more vulnerable to mental ill-health in an increasingly hostile climate.6
· The treatment and management of mental health problems already costs taxpayers over $5 billion per year,7 while the cost in lost productivity is estimated at another $2.7 billion8—costs set to rise in a changing climate. Mental health problems also tend to coalesce with economic and social ones, meaning that the overall toll is likely to be larger still.
· Employment and cost-of-living impacts usually precede a mental health toll: in the recent drought, for example, 2004 figures indicate that around one in four rural workers had lost their job—about 100,000 agricultural workers, contractors and those employed in allied businesses.9 By 2007, prolonged dry conditions had eroded Australians’ quality of life, in dollar terms, to the tune of approximately $5.4 billion.10 At the same time, the cost of the average grocery bill for all Australian households rose 12 per cent;11 stark evidence of the affect on the cost of living by extreme weather events and a foretaste of worse to come without action on climate change.
· Rural, regional, remote and peri-urban communities are particularly exposed in a deteriorating climate. Climate change compounds the chronic difficulties and inequities that already face many communities—Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous. Already, many parts of the country find it hard to recruit dedicated health care and social service professionals. Climate change will almost certainly increase the demand for social support and mental health services and, at the same time, make it harder to sustain them in affected areas.
· Climate change will render already stressful resource-use conflicts—like those in the Murray-Darling Basin—even more volatile and damaging to the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities.
· In the long term, there is a heightened risk of stress and tension amongst both newcomers and their host communities as people are forced to move permanently and en masse in response to a rapidly shifting climate. The loss of a sense of place—particularly for Indigenous peoples—may magnify and complicate the mental and emotional pressures.
· Children, in particular, are vulnerable to pre-disaster anxiety and post-trauma illness. Adults’ failure to act on climate change may, like the indecision that perpetuated the Cold War, lead to long-lived insecurity and anxiety in young people.
· Even for those not directly affected by an extreme weather event, news of loved ones lost or property damaged, together with the sheer the enormity of disasters like the Queensland floods—often magnified by media coverage—can be distressing and debilitating.
