As in the case of wildfire air pollution, we tend to think of big, headline-grabbing events when we think about the health impacts of climate change. And yet, just as important are the slow forms of violence that constrict and damage our lives.
Heatwaves encapsulate this kind of climate attrition. The summer of 2023 was Europe’s deadliest on record, and one of the warmest summers ever recorded worldwide. That year, 61,000 people died in Europe, and thousands more succumbed around the world.
Irritability
Recent studies have set out the deadly cost of heatwaves since 1991, when climate change first became a global political issue, and the level of warming was already around 0.4C above the pre-industrial average.
More than seven million people have died in heatwaves caused by climate change. As with most other climate impacts, the poorer you are, the more vulnerable – both within countries and between them.
Heatwaves overwhelm the body, spiking its internal temperature. As the temperature rises, our bodies sweat in an attempt to cool us down. As we sweat, we lose water.
This dehydration weakens our ability to think clearly, thickens our blood and compromises our kidneys. Our skin gets hotter, putting our cardiovascular system under strain which, along with thicker blood, may trigger heart attacks and strokes. As our bodies heat up, our organs can’t function properly and in some cases can begin to fail.
The heat is oppressive. Living under heat extremes is disabling as well as deadly. Aggression and violence both rise with the temperature. Irritability increases, sleep quality decreases. Suicide rates go up. And as the Earth warms further, this oppressive atmosphere will worsen.
Risk
Heat, like pollution, attacks our very ability to be social, and to be political. And, of course, it devastates the economy. In 2022 alone, 490 billion labour hours were lost to heat stress. The same factor wiped out four per cent of Africa’s GDP that year.
Each kind of disaster has its own shadow. Fires kill, but they also produce air pollution crises, as well as a series of illnesses, besides trauma. Flooding prompts outbreaks of disease, alongside profound levels of mental illness.
Both can lead to spikes in homelessness and displacement. Millions are already displaced each year due to environmental disasters – over 30 million globally in 2023, including over 2.2 million in the United States.
Billions more are predicted to be exposed to environmental disasters by 2050. Alongside the death, ill health and displacement comes the destruction of community and a loss of place, deepening the affective cost of climate change.
And then there are other impacts. The geographical ranges of diseases like malaria spread, putting millions at risk. Between 2030 and 2050, our near future, climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths per year, pointing towards 83 million excess deaths by 2100.
Solastalgia
And this is probably an underestimate. What this estimate doesn’t do is describe what it will feel like to live with the stress of increased air pollution, the anxiety of not knowing how bad the storm or flooding will be, the oppression of a monstrous heatwave, or the deterioration of our health as heat, disease and poor nutrition all take their toll on us and those we care for.
All of this adds to the immense emotional and psychological burden climate change is already placing on us. While austerity, economic stagnation, increasing precarity and poverty are all devastating, climate change too is driving a profound shift in our mental health.
Flooding, like that in Lewes, England, in 2000, or in Lismore in Eastern Australia in 2022, has critical effects on people’s psyches. Beyond the impact of the immediate event, trauma including PTSD lasts for years. With the destruction of homes comes a sense of not only loss, but of pervasive insecurity.
So too with fires and storms. Disasters linger long after the event as trauma is written into our bodies, eroding our sense of safety.
They can destroy our sense of place, making our homes and communities unfamiliar and threatening, leading to feelings of solastalgia, the grief or existential distress felt for a lost place.
Knock-on
Coupled with sleep lost due to rising temperatures and heatwaves, as well as the compound effects of reduced incomes and food and energy insecurity, plus pervasive disruptions to services and everyday practicalities, life will be – and already is – far more stressful and anxious, even as disruption becomes a stupefyingly ordinary event.
Of course, there is a real material cost to disasters, one that is crushing to households and business alike. From the mundane costs associated with repairs to those accrued from businesses shutting down, or days lost to work, all the way to worst-case scenarios where homes and lives are lost, storms and disasters extract a huge financial toll.
Globally extreme weather cost the world US$16 million per day in 2023. The costs are increasing year on year – there has been a five-fold increase in the number of extreme weather events since 1970, with the damage done by each event increasing by 77 per cent.
It can be difficult to measure the impact on households. Often we have to use insurance claims as a proxy. In 2023 in the US, weather-related damage cost almost US$93 billion, while in Britain households claimed £573m in 2023 to pay for weather-related damage – a 36 per cent increase on the previous year.
British businesses also took a hammering, incurring £443m in losses. These are the direct costs incurred, not the knock-on impacts.
Ghettos
The average time it takes for a business to get back on its feet after flood damage is around fifty days. And given how many small businesses are run on thin margins, it’s not uncommon for disasters to wipe them out, taking their jobs and services to the local area with them. In Britain, 40 per cent of small business permanently close after taking flood damage.
Only two-thirds of households have insurance, meaning storm or flood damage could be personally and financially catastrophic and making recovery hard, if not impossible.
This is not just a question of the rising costs of premiums. More and more, insurance companies are deciding that particular kinds of events, or entire areas, are too risky to insure.
The withdrawal of insurance extends to business as well. In 2024 two insurance companies in the US withdrew renewals and policies for tens of thousands of homes in Florida and California, while insurance company CEOs warned that the industry itself was at risk.
The withdrawal of the possibility of insurance is already creating ‘flood risk ghettos’, while the same is happening for areas at growing risk of fire.
Angry
Increasingly, areas will be depopulated as the costs of climate change mount. This won’t be an even process. Those who can afford to move, will. Businesses will withdraw from the area, citing exposure.
Insurance company CEOs are already telling people that ‘they may have to move … that is the reality of climate change.’
The economic base of whole towns and regions will wither, hollowing them out in a way analogous to the worst impacts of deindustrialisation. Only those too poor to relocate, or tied to assets that will only continue to decline in value, will stay. The worst-case scenario for many in the Global North isn’t being forced to move but being unable to move.
Recent years have seen a body of research into what’s called ecological grief or climate anxiety. Across ten countries around the world, researchers found that an average 60 per cent of children and young adults were very or extremely worried about climate change, rising to 84 per cent who considered themselves worried.
More than half said climate change made them feel sad, angry, anxious, helpless or guilty. And 45 per cent said it negatively affected their ability to get on with their daily life.
Struggling
This will come as no surprise. We all know – or are – someone whose life feels as though it is being stifled by fears associated with a warmer future.
While professionally optimistic journalists and campaigners exhort us to not give in to despair, it’s hard to escape the crushing sense that, if things are already hard, they are going to get much, much harder.
The result of the squeeze on people for capital will be a shortage of labour. Combined with ageing populations and the breakdown of education programs, generating skill shortages, we can expect few things to work, and everyday life to be shaped by announcements of service disruptions and featuring ‘closed’ signs.
Worse still, this will be compounded by the fiscal crises of the state as a provider of services, already struggling under the weight of costly disasters.
Transition
As the economic space within which people live shrinks, and services become ever harder to access and generally inadequate, expectations and hopes will also contract.
The climate squeeze presents us with a stark political choice. Either we can suffer for their transition, or we can organise to disrupt green capitalism.
While the parts are there – from campaign groups to renter unions, from street level mobilisations to workplace activists – we are yet to bring them together into an effect movement, one capable of fighting the war of transition.
The first step is recognising the reality of the transition. Once we’ve done so, we can start to bring the parts together and build the movement we need.
The choice is clear. Either we suffer their squeeze, or come together to fight for a real transition, one that that makes space for all of us.
This Author
Dr Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer at the University of Essex researching the politics and political economy of climate change and the green transition. His book Or Something Worse: Why we ned to disrupt the climate transition is out with Verso this month.