Climate policy often measures what can be counted in money. But when climate impacts uproot people, erode cultural ties or damage social bonds, those losses can affect mental health in ways that a financial estimate cannot fully capture. Manasi Kumar argues that climate “Loss and Damage” policy could help address this gap by treating mental health as a legitimate part of climate harm.
In a PLOS Climate article, Kumar describes climate change as a growing influence on population mental health. Extreme weather, displacement, food and livelihood insecurity, gradual environmental degradation and uncertainty about the future can contribute to depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and psychosocial distress. The article highlights children, displaced people, Indigenous communities and others facing structural disadvantage as groups that may be particularly affected.
Much of the climate and mental health discussion focuses on adaptation: preparing health systems, strengthening resilience and managing disasters. Kumar says those efforts are necessary, but not enough when impacts exceed the ability to adapt. Permanent displacement, irreversible ecosystem loss and repeated shocks that wear away livelihoods can leave chronic, cumulative and intergenerational harm.
Loss and Damage policy is intended to address impacts that remain beyond mitigation and adaptation. Kumar points to the United Nations climate governance structures created for this purpose, including the Warsaw International Mechanism, the Santiago Network and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. The article’s central argument is that this policy area already recognizes non-economic harms, including harm to health, wellbeing, culture, identity and social cohesion. That makes it a potential route for giving mental health a stronger place in climate finance and accountability.
The hard question, Kumar writes, is how to value and finance harms that do not fit neatly into conventional economic accounts. Drawing on the Dasgupta Review on the economics of biodiversity, the article presents “inclusive wealth” as a way to consider natural, human, social and produced assets, rather than judging prosperity only by short-term income. Valuation, in this view, can inform decisions without claiming that every kind of value can be reduced to a price.
Putting a monetary estimate on psychosocial harm could help bring mental health into funding decisions. Yet the article warns against treating that estimate as the full value of a loss. Grief, identity, belonging and connection to ancestral land may not be replaceable through financial transfers or gains elsewhere. Measures such as treatment costs or lost productivity capture only parts of the harm. A financial recovery after a climate shock, Kumar argues, could therefore coexist with worsening wellbeing or weaker social cohesion.
Kumar proposes a plural approach: use monetary estimates selectively to inform comparisons or unlock finance, while making clear that they are partial. Mental health indicators could serve as accountability signals for whether climate responses protect or erode the conditions that support wellbeing. Financing rules, the article argues, should also make room for community-based, long-term psychosocial support, including collective healing, cultural restoration and social support, alongside clinical care.
The article notes that relevant indicators—including suicide mortality, post-disaster service demand, displacement-related distress, food-insecurity-linked strain and wellbeing—are already collected in health, humanitarian and development data. Kumar identifies the main challenge as institutional: these measures are rarely interpreted as signs of environmental governance performance. Making mental health explicit in Loss and Damage guidance, financing criteria and reporting could connect climate response more closely with public health and human rights commitments.
This is a policy argument, not a report of a tested intervention or proof that a particular financing model improves mental health. Kumar also stresses that Loss and Damage cannot replace mitigation, adaptation or strong health systems. Its significance, the article concludes, lies in offering an underused policy space to respond when climate harms exceed adaptive capacity—and in asking whether climate governance protects the foundations of collective wellbeing, including those that cannot be priced. <a href="https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0001100">Source: Loss and damage as mental health policy</a>