Eco-Affective Health: Exploring Emotions, Behavior and Well-Being in Sustainability

Sustainability transitions ultimately depend on sustained human engagement, yet sustainability science has largely overlooked a foundational determinant of whether such engagement endures: affect. Although emotions shape how environmental change is perceived, evaluated, and acted upon, they remain conceptually fragmented—typically treated as secondary outcomes, communication tools, or clinical concerns rather than as a core dimension of sustainability itself. This Perspective introduces Eco-Affective Health, offered as a conceptual lens rather than an exhaustive theory of environmental behavior that positions affective dynamics as a central regulatory mechanism operating in continuous interaction with cognitive appraisal and linking environmental conditions to human well-being, behavior, and the long-term viability of sustainability transitions. Eco-Affective Health conceptualizes emotions as dynamic, context-sensitive responses emerging from interactions among environmental exposures, social structures, and lived experience within complex human–environment systems, with cascading effects on motivation, agency, collective action, and disengagement. By embedding affect within socio-environmental systems, the framework explains why similar environmental challenges can generate divergent trajectories of sustained engagement, emotional fatigue, or polarization across populations and over time. Eco-Affective Health distinguishes affective responses to environmental change from psychopathology, reframing them as adaptive signals that reflect the alignment—or misalignment—between sustainability pathways and human experience. The framework’s scope, its relationship to cognition, and its position alongside cognate inner–outer sustainability and mindfulness-based frameworks are discussed explicitly, together with directions for future systematic empirical synthesis. By foregrounding affect as a foundational layer of sustainability science, this framework offers a human-centered lens for understanding behavioral persistence, policy legitimacy, and social resilience under accelerating environmental change.