Climate change isn’t just reshaping our planet — it’s also weighing heavily on people’s minds. Around the world, more and more people are experiencing emotional and mental strain as they watch their environments change or disappear. This feeling that scholars call ecological grief goes beyond just sadness about a melting glacier or a lost species. It’s a deep emotional response to the loss of places, ecosystems, and even ways of life that hold personal, cultural, or spiritual meaning. Until now, most discussions of ecological grief have focused on people’s connection to nature. But there’s another layer that often gets overlooked: the distress caused by being forced to leave your home or losing the land that sustains your community.

By drawing on case studies from Ethiopia and Kenya, a new article in SSM-Mental Health co-authored by SIS professor Lauren Carruth explores how climate change is disrupting lives not only through environmental destruction but also through displacement, loss of livelihood, and broken ties to cultural identity.

In Ethiopia’s Somali region, for example, pastoralists face repeated climate shocks that make their traditional way of life harder to sustain. In Kenya’s Kilifi County, farmers are dealing with prolonged droughts that threaten their crops and futures. These communities are very different — yet both are grappling with the emotional fallout of environmental change. What connects them is a shared sense of grief, stress, and uncertainty tied to the loss of the world they once knew.

Carruth and her co-authors suggest it’s time to think of ecological grief not just as a reaction to damaged landscapes, but as a response to the lived experience of climate change — one that includes displacement, identity, and deep emotional upheaval.

Read the full open-access article here.