Climate Change and Health Equity: A Research Agenda for Psychological Science

Climate change poses unique and substantial threats to public health and well-being, from heat stress, flooding, and the spread of infectious disease to food and water insecurity, conflict, displacement, and direct health hazards linked to fossil fuels. These threats are especially acute for frontline communities. Addressing climate change and its unequal impacts requires psychologists to consider temporal and spatial dimensions of health, compound risks, as well as structural sources of vulnerability implicated by few other public health challenges. In this review, we consider climate change as a unique context for the study of health inequities and the roles of psychologists and health care practitioners in addressing it. We conclude by discussing the research infrastructure needed to broaden current understanding of these inequities, including new cross-disciplinary, institutional, and community partnerships, and offer six practical recommendations for advancing the psychological study of climate health equity and its societal relevance.