Humanitarian workers affiliated with international non-governmental organizations, especially those who live and work in high-risk, high-threat environments, are susceptible to developing mental illnesses, including anxiety, trauma, and depression. As war, conflict, and political unrest converge with an increasingly volatile and changing climate, the humanitarian worker is uniquely positioned to be impacted by these threats while also expected to meet the demands of highly vulnerable communities.
Humanitarian Work and a Changing Climate
Humanitarians, by definition, live and work in resource-limited environments that ask them to stretch beyond their normal capacities and draw from already low energy reserves to provide funding, front-line support, resources, and education to those in need of critical assistance – often those in low-income countries, refugees, and migrants. In a world grappling with climate change, the increasing frequency of heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and other extreme climate events threaten livelihood, physical health, and life more broadly. As global warming continues to worsen, climate-related disasters increase each year, putting low- and middle-income countries, where humanitarian aid is most needed, most at risk. At the center of these disasters, humanitarian workers must exist within a fragile state where climate change is having a deleterious effect on physical and mental wellness while navigating a challenging career that asks them to pull from waning resilience with fewer and fewer resources. Further complicating the issue is the cumulative effect of highly stressful and even traumatic humanitarian responses that lead to moral injury in humanitarian workers, which occurs when a person begins to question their deeply held values and beliefs in response to traumatic events (Macpherson & Burkle Jr., 2020).
Facing an Uncertain Future in Humanitarian Response
Already functioning in precarious economic, political, and environmental conditions, humanitarian workers must now navigate largely uncharted territory to understand their own and their beneficiaries’ mental health in the face of climate change. According to the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in humanitarian action (ALNAP), “as future disasters related to climate change get bigger, happen faster and affect more people, our existing knowledge and capacity for response may not be enough. These new, more complex types of disasters may call for new modalities of humanitarian action” (de Geoffroy et al., 2021). ALNAP references three types of climate-related disasters: those that are known, those that are imperfectly understood, and those that are unknown. Each new disaster brings a nuanced response that will require well-trained responders who function with high levels of mental wellness. As the world continues down a path of unknown consequence in relation to climate disasters, the nexus of humanitarian response and mental health will become such that the need for psychoeducation and mental health resources specifically designed for the humanitarian worker will emerge with greater urgency and demand.
Reduced Funding for Humanitarian Work
Reduced funding from the humanitarian sector’s largest donors is putting humanitarians at an increased risk of facing mental illness exacerbated by climate change with little to no resources to support their acute and long-term wellbeing. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that donor funding for humanitarian aid is decreasing while the need for this funding is increasing. In 2024 alone, the funding needed for humanitarian work increased from $46.4 billion to $48.7 billion between January and May (OCHA, 2024). As humanitarian aid organizations struggle to progress their missions, mental health resources and support for humanitarian workers are often the first cuts made, further risking the achievement of mission-related goals as workers struggle with their own mental illnesses. In a time where the need for mental health providers far outweighs the availability of such support, the humanitarian worker is at risk of being deprioritized by organizations who place budgetary priorities elsewhere.
Providing mental health support and resources to humanitarian workers is a matter of justice. Those who are and will continue to be most negatively impacted by a changing climate are those in the most resource-limited countries and communities, the very people who are supported by the work of humanitarian aid providers. Essentially, those who suffer the most will be caught between a worsening health scenario from direct climate-disaster impact and a shrinking support system of healthy, resilient humanitarian workers. Wading through limited resources, mental health stigma, and a lack of accessible evidenced-based interventions within humanitarian organizations exacerbates the challenges faced by humanitarian workers. In a system where the worker must voluntarily admit to experiencing declining mental health while also facing significant burnout and continuously increasing disasters, it can be expected that the humanitarian worker’s mental health will continue to worsen.
Call for Mental Health Services for the Humanitarian Worker
Comprehensive mental health programs for the humanitarian worker cannot exist passively within communities and organizations. Employers must take responsibility for protecting, not only the physical safety and wellbeing of employees, but for ensuring humanitarian workers who are at an increased risk of mental illness, including death by suicide, have access to both proactive and reactive evidence-based clinical support specifically designed to address their needs.
As social identity theory informs us, people exist as individuals at the same time as they are part of a collective of small and large communities and are informed by the norms of those groups. The existential threat that is climate change has the unique ability to impact humanitarians’ mental health on a deeply personal level while also bringing into question what it means to coexist within a community, a country, an organization, etc. Humanitarians often move frequently between settings where people are strained by very different, but highly life-changing climate-related extremes and disasters. This positions them to hold multiple vantage points related to climate change and threatens their wellbeing as they waver between witnessing real harm caused by food insecurity, displacement, resource restrictions, and more.
While not yet widely researched, there are some known interventions to support mental health and wellbeing for anyone experiencing distress related to the changing climate. The American Psychological Association (APA) highlights impactful interventions as “those that lead to improved mood, social behavior, cognitive function, academic performance, and the senses of control, agency, and wellbeing, and reduced stress, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” (Clayton et al., 2021).
And, critical to any mental health plan are the factors of cultural and local contexts. Local solutions that provide opportunities for short-term solutions-focused counseling, long-term therapy, proactive psychoeducational training, Climate Café s for the humanitarian worker (structured safe spaces for people to express their climate-related feelings), and opportunities to engage with nature from a local and cultural context have been shown to positively impact the mental health and wellbeing of those suffering from eco-distress, as they lead to validation and normalization of feelings, addressing related mental illness like eco-anxiety, and positive action.
In the APA’s Addressing the Climate Crisis: An Action Plan for Psychologists (2022), recommendations are provided for working toward the mitigation of climate-related mental health symptoms, including addressing:
Psychological responses to climate; nature, development, and prevalence of mental health conditions and social problems associated with climate change; effects of climate change on health-related behaviors; effects of pre-existing mental health conditions on capacity to cope with climate change impacts; therapies specifically tied to climate and the environment; and support and guidance for people and communities transitioning to new forms of living that are less energy intensive and more protective and respectful of the environment (p. 12).
Though humanitarian workers are not specifically named as a vulnerable population, this guidance provides a useful roadmap from which specific interventions for the humanitarian worker can be developed.
Though mental health has recently become more prevalent in climate change conversations, discussion around humanitarian workers’ experiences related to the impacts of climate change are still largely missing. As humanitarian workers come face to face with disasters and human suffering, and as global warming threatens to increase disasters year over year, humanitarian workers will experience stress, burnout, and unprecedented levels of mental illness without focused attention on these risks and vulnerabilities.
Peer-Based Model of Support for a Climate-Changed World
Moving beyond being recipients of mental health support, humanitarian workers are also uniquely positioned to serve as frontline supports to those most negatively affected by climate change who may not otherwise have access to psychoeducation and resilience-building resources following climate-related events.
With dedicated funding and resources, humanitarian workers can be trained on how to provide psychological first aid, peer-run workshops, and training programs that offer self-care resources, information about the connection between climate and mental health (e.g., there is a known correlation between heat and mood disorders) (Clayton et al., 2021), and guidelines for implementing resilience building community-level programs.
Planning Must Begin Now
As we now find ourselves at a crossroads within the international humanitarian sector, the time to prepare for the existential threat of climate change must move beyond only considering the economic and geographical impact of increasing extreme events and disasters. Lying at the intersection of mental health and humanitarian response work is an unclear path forward. Without clear and specific mental health and resilience guidelines and a prioritization of these resources, we risk facing a reduction in the humanitarian work force at a time when their professional skillset is most critically needed.
References
American Psychological Association, APA Task Force on Climate Change. (2022) Addressing the climate crisis: An action plan for psychologists, report of the APA task force on climate change. https://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/ climate-crisis-action-plan.pdf.
Clayton, S., Manning, C., Speiser, M., & Hill, A. N. (2021). Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities, Responses. American Psychological Association, Climate for Health, and ecoAmerica. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/mental-health-climate-change.pdf
de Geoffroy, V., Knox Clarke, P., Bhatt, M. and Grunewald, F. (2021) Adapting humanitarian action to the effects of climate change. London: ALNAP.
Lawrance, E. L., Thompson, R., Newberry Le Vay, J., Page, L., & Jennings, N. (2022). The Impact of Climate Change on Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing: A Narrative Review of Current Evidence, and its Implications. International Review of Psychiatry, 34(5), 443–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2022.2128725
Macpherson, R. I. S., & Burkle Jr, F. M. (2021). Humanitarian aid workers: The forgotten first responders. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 36(1), 111–114.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049023X20001326
OCHA. (2024) Global humanitarian overview 2024, mid-year update (Snapshot as of 31 May 2024). Retrieved September 9, 2024, from https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/world/global humanitarian-overview-2024-mid-year-update-snapshot-31-may-2024
