Do moral evaluations of climate change threaten mental health?

Climate change presents multiple threats to mental health, including not only direct impacts of extreme weather but also more diffuse effects associated with awareness of the changing climate and of human culpability for those changes. This awareness can include a moral evaluation recognizing the ‘wrongness’ of climate change. The concept of moral distress, or the more intense experience of moral injury, refers to the deleterious effects of witnessing or participating in actions that violate one’s ethical principles or deeply held values; research has demonstrated that moral distress can impair mental health and well-being. We argue that moral evaluations and moral distress are an important part of the human response to the climate crisis, distinct from, but relevant to climate anxiety, and that climate moral distress likely constitutes one way in which climate change threatens mental health. We offer an agenda to encourage further research into this phenomenon. If climate moral distress contributes to distress about climate change and is a mental health threat, moral repair should be considered as part of an adaptive response to climate change.