Global warming could bring down world's emotional well-being by 2.3%

A continued global warming could bring down the world's emotional well-being by 2.3 per cent by 2100, according to a study that shows how climate change threatens one's daily experience and not just health and economic stability.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others in the US, analysed 1.2 billion social media posts of 2019 from 157 countries.

Findings published in the journal ‘One Earth’ show that daily maximum temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius can worsen people's emotional well-being, with poorer countries impacted disproportionately -- almost thrice -- compared to richer ones.

Policymakers cannot truly assess the social costs of climate change or design equitable interventions to protect citizens' physical and psychological health without an understanding of how temperature affects emotional well-being globally, the authors said.

Subtle, yet widespread psychological effects of extreme temperatures need to be accounted for while developing climate adaptation policies, they added.

The findings can help develop climate strategies that integrate emotional well-being, temperature-based warning systems and target support where impacts are most severe, the team said.

"Our analysis of 1.2 billion social media posts from 157 countries reveals that moderate warming improves sentiment in cooler regions, but temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius harm well-being globally, with disproportionate impacts on poorer countries and a projected 2.3 per cent sentiment decline by 2100," the authors wrote. They also found that the effects were "three times greater in low- and middle-income countries (25 per cent decline in sentiment) than in high-income countries (8.1 per cent)".

The results support those from previous studies that analysed posts of social media users in China and the US, and found extremes in weather conditions to be related to expressing more negative sentiments, especially for women and people in poorer cities.

Further, the use of air conditioning did not substantially indicate an adaptation to summers, according to a 2020 study that analysed over 400 million social media posts from 43 million users in China. It is published in the journal One Earth.