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Extreme Temperatures Seem To Be Messing With Children’s Mental Health

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Thursday, June 13, 2024

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Researchers are now connecting the dots between the climate crisis and the havoc heat can wreak on developing minds. Extreme heat and other climate calamities “impact our first and worst, our most vulnerable,” said Jennifer Runkle, an environmental epidemiologist at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies. She is the lead author of a recent study which found that during periods of intense drought and heat, children and young adults showing signs of mood disorders and suicide risks visited emergency rooms at alarming rates. The risk soared in the hardest-hit parts of the state, especially in lower-income areas and densely populated cities. Children are especially vulnerable to extreme heat and drought because they have a diminished ability to regulate their body temperature or otherwise cope with the heat. To understand how dangerous extreme weather could be for them, Runkle used data in North Carolina, a state routinely ravaged by dry spells in dozens of counties and droughts that can last months at a time. As in many other parts of the world, the state has gotten hotter and dryer in recent years. Runkle and her colleagues focused their study on dry periods from 2016 to 2019. They found that young people were visiting emergency departments at alarming rates whenever there was an extended heatwave, a drought or both. “If you have a child that grows up with increased environmental stress…that is early life stress.” During heat waves in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, psychiatric emergency visits by young people jumped 29 percent. And during a drought in the state’s western mountains and on the eastern coastline, emergency room visits more than quadrupled in those parts of the state. Within that span, around 1,800 young emergency department admits were for mood disorder cases, including 1,300 for suicide attempts. The most at-risk children were from low-income families with a history of mental health issues. A higher proportion of emergency admissions were Black or girls younger than 12, according to Runkle’s study. In a separate paper published in 2023, another team of scientists documented similar trends with pediatric patients in New York City. Dr. Perry Sheffield, lead author of the study and associate professor of environmental medicine, climate science and pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has been interested in how climate affects children for years. Her group looked at 83,000 emergency department visits between 2005 and 2011 and tried to find a link between these admissions and spikes in temperature. Like Runkle, their study saw elevated cases of anxiety and bipolar disorders. “People who are more vulnerable are those who already have mental health conditions,” Sheffield said. Each team’s work is consistent with previous research linking rising temperatures to depression and suicidality, violence and hospitalizations in adults. Young people may be even more susceptible due to several factors working in tandem, according to Dr. Joshua Wortzel, a pediatric psychiatrist at Brown University who also studies temperatures and suicidality in kids. He notes that thermoregulation, a person’s ability to maintain a stable body temperature despite external conditions, is often dysfunctional in children predisposed to mental illnesses. If children are also taking medications to treat those mental illnesses, heat exposure could be even more dangerous. Some antipsychotics reduce sweat production—a cooling process—while simultaneously altering the hypothalamus, which Wortzel calls “the main thermostat of the brain.” Temperature and a therapeutic neurotransmitter called serotonin have a close relationship as well. When it’s suddenly too warm out, levels of serotonin can rise, according to Wortzel. With too much serotonin, other regions of the brain, including those that regulate temperature, lose their ability to function properly. That can also make it harder for people of all ages, but especially for kids and teens, to control their emotions. Wortzel suggests that for developing brains,irregular levels of serotonin means children could be more prone to anger, irritation and exacerbated symptoms of mood disorders. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s crucial in controlling behavior and executive function, also suffers from serotonin induced by hot weather. Sleep and physical activity play a huge role for kids too, said Dr. Martin Paulus, scientific director and president of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tulsa. Families who live in hot areas are prone to restlessness at night and chronic inflammation that over time can lead to foggy memories and depression. What’s especially tricky with physical activity is that being active does prime the brain’s hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to better regulate depression and aggression, and keep stress hormones from going awry. But most kids don’t—and shouldn’t—play outside when it’s excessively hot. By moving around less, Paulus is concerned about the various ways stress can slip into children’s lives and elevate their risk for mood swings. Both experts feel metabolic imbalances that affect energy levels and inflammation sparked by heat are additional areas of concern. Inflammation left unchecked, they believe, can affect levels of serotonin, dopamine and hormones. According to Wortzel and Paulus, when stress hormones are constantly in flux, it could lead to poor mental health now and in the future. “If you have a child that grows up with increased environmental stress…that is early life stress,” Paulus said. Stress at such a young age is associated with greater risk for depression and post-traumatic stress, and both can have enormous physical and mental consequences that affect children long into adulthood. The hottest parts of the US should brace themselves for a stressful future, Paulus suggests. “We know that high humidity and high heat in the South and Southeast will continue to increase. These areas are most likely to be disproportionately affected over the next few years.” Parents and other adults in kids’ lives need to be on the lookout for changes such as mood swings and isolation from other children, Wortzel said, along with “statements about hopelessness, helplessness, worthlessness, thoughts of not wanting to be around anymore.” Whenever it’s hot out, adults should pay extra attention if children mention overexertion and dehydration. Cooling centers and cooling pillows that pull heat away from the body will be increasingly important in hot cities as temperature spikes become more normal. Clinicians, too, must be vigilant, and ready to urge psychotherapy for young people affected by heat. Wortzel acknowledges this is a problem that might not be easily or widely accepted. How the climate and environment affect mental health is still broadly debated, despite plenty of research. So doctors must be “fairly aggressive” in advocating for better public awareness of the problem, he said. Paulus agrees, and has encouraged clinician scientists to adopt monitoring systems that identify trends in childhood mental wellness and extreme weather. That enhanced awareness could protect kids from the ramifications of a warming world. It starts with clinicians themselves, many of whom aren’t aware of the climate-mental health connection, experts said. “I think it’s important to start bringing extreme heat and other climate stressors to the clinical community as a risk factor,” Runkle said, “so that we can get better clinical [and] school guidance out there.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Researchers are now connecting the dots between the climate crisis and the havoc heat can wreak on developing minds.

Extreme heat and other climate calamities “impact our first and worst, our most vulnerable,” said Jennifer Runkle, an environmental epidemiologist at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies. She is the lead author of a recent study which found that during periods of intense drought and heat, children and young adults showing signs of mood disorders and suicide risks visited emergency rooms at alarming rates. The risk soared in the hardest-hit parts of the state, especially in lower-income areas and densely populated cities.

Children are especially vulnerable to extreme heat and drought because they have a diminished ability to regulate their body temperature or otherwise cope with the heat. To understand how dangerous extreme weather could be for them, Runkle used data in North Carolina, a state routinely ravaged by dry spells in dozens of counties and droughts that can last months at a time.

As in many other parts of the world, the state has gotten hotter and dryer in recent years. Runkle and her colleagues focused their study on dry periods from 2016 to 2019. They found that young people were visiting emergency departments at alarming rates whenever there was an extended heatwave, a drought or both.

“If you have a child that grows up with increased environmental stress…that is early life stress.”

During heat waves in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, psychiatric emergency visits by young people jumped 29 percent. And during a drought in the state’s western mountains and on the eastern coastline, emergency room visits more than quadrupled in those parts of the state.

Within that span, around 1,800 young emergency department admits were for mood disorder cases, including 1,300 for suicide attempts. The most at-risk children were from low-income families with a history of mental health issues. A higher proportion of emergency admissions were Black or girls younger than 12, according to Runkle’s study.

In a separate paper published in 2023, another team of scientists documented similar trends with pediatric patients in New York City. Dr. Perry Sheffield, lead author of the study and associate professor of environmental medicine, climate science and pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has been interested in how climate affects children for years.

Her group looked at 83,000 emergency department visits between 2005 and 2011 and tried to find a link between these admissions and spikes in temperature. Like Runkle, their study saw elevated cases of anxiety and bipolar disorders.

“People who are more vulnerable are those who already have mental health conditions,” Sheffield said.

Each team’s work is consistent with previous research linking rising temperatures to depression and suicidality, violence and hospitalizations in adults. Young people may be even more susceptible due to several factors working in tandem, according to Dr. Joshua Wortzel, a pediatric psychiatrist at Brown University who also studies temperatures and suicidality in kids.

He notes that thermoregulation, a person’s ability to maintain a stable body temperature despite external conditions, is often dysfunctional in children predisposed to mental illnesses. If children are also taking medications to treat those mental illnesses, heat exposure could be even more dangerous. Some antipsychotics reduce sweat production—a cooling process—while simultaneously altering the hypothalamus, which Wortzel calls “the main thermostat of the brain.”

Temperature and a therapeutic neurotransmitter called serotonin have a close relationship as well. When it’s suddenly too warm out, levels of serotonin can rise, according to Wortzel. With too much serotonin, other regions of the brain, including those that regulate temperature, lose their ability to function properly.

That can also make it harder for people of all ages, but especially for kids and teens, to control their emotions. Wortzel suggests that for developing brains,irregular levels of serotonin means children could be more prone to anger, irritation and exacerbated symptoms of mood disorders. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s crucial in controlling behavior and executive function, also suffers from serotonin induced by hot weather.

Sleep and physical activity play a huge role for kids too, said Dr. Martin Paulus, scientific director and president of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tulsa. Families who live in hot areas are prone to restlessness at night and chronic inflammation that over time can lead to foggy memories and depression.

What’s especially tricky with physical activity is that being active does prime the brain’s hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to better regulate depression and aggression, and keep stress hormones from going awry. But most kids don’t—and shouldn’t—play outside when it’s excessively hot. By moving around less, Paulus is concerned about the various ways stress can slip into children’s lives and elevate their risk for mood swings.

Both experts feel metabolic imbalances that affect energy levels and inflammation sparked by heat are additional areas of concern. Inflammation left unchecked, they believe, can affect levels of serotonin, dopamine and hormones. According to Wortzel and Paulus, when stress hormones are constantly in flux, it could lead to poor mental health now and in the future.

“If you have a child that grows up with increased environmental stress…that is early life stress,” Paulus said. Stress at such a young age is associated with greater risk for depression and post-traumatic stress, and both can have enormous physical and mental consequences that affect children long into adulthood.

The hottest parts of the US should brace themselves for a stressful future, Paulus suggests. “We know that high humidity and high heat in the South and Southeast will continue to increase. These areas are most likely to be disproportionately affected over the next few years.”

Parents and other adults in kids’ lives need to be on the lookout for changes such as mood swings and isolation from other children, Wortzel said, along with “statements about hopelessness, helplessness, worthlessness, thoughts of not wanting to be around anymore.” Whenever it’s hot out, adults should pay extra attention if children mention overexertion and dehydration. Cooling centers and cooling pillows that pull heat away from the body will be increasingly important in hot cities as temperature spikes become more normal.

Clinicians, too, must be vigilant, and ready to urge psychotherapy for young people affected by heat. Wortzel acknowledges this is a problem that might not be easily or widely accepted. How the climate and environment affect mental health is still broadly debated, despite plenty of research. So doctors must be “fairly aggressive” in advocating for better public awareness of the problem, he said. Paulus agrees, and has encouraged clinician scientists to adopt monitoring systems that identify trends in childhood mental wellness and extreme weather.

That enhanced awareness could protect kids from the ramifications of a warming world. It starts with clinicians themselves, many of whom aren’t aware of the climate-mental health connection, experts said. “I think it’s important to start bringing extreme heat and other climate stressors to the clinical community as a risk factor,” Runkle said, “so that we can get better clinical [and] school guidance out there.”

Read the full story here.

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How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods

In the face of mounting climate disasters, tribes, scientists, and Southern communities are rallying around a nearly forgotten native plant.

In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff trekked out to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stalks of rivercane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on an eroded, degraded strip of wetland: a “gnarly” and “wicked” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful, this planting would be the largest cane restoration project in Alabama history. He and his team got the stalks into the ground, buttressed them with hay, left, and hoped for the best. A few days later, rains swept through the area and the river rose by 9 feet. “We were terrified,” said Fedoroff. He and his team raced back to the site, expecting to find bare dirt. Instead, they found that the rivercane had survived — and so, crucially, had the stream bank. Rivercane used to line the streams, rivers, and bogs of the Southeast from the Blue Ridge Mountains down to the Mississippi Delta. 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This year, I really see education and climate.” Scott's assets have grown even as she's given away a fortune When Scott started detailing her giving in 2020, her fortune was valued around $36 billion, according to Forbes. It's fluctuated over the years, but today, Forbes estimates her net worth to be $33 billion, even as she's given away more than $26 billion. Initially, Scott told grantees not to expect or plan for a second gift, but over time, she has given additional gifts to some of the same organizations, often larger than her original grant. “She clearly is getting comfortable with reinvesting in partners that she thinks are doing good work,” said Fitzgerald. At least one organization, CAMFED, which supports girl's education in African countries, has now received four gifts from Scott, including the largest so far, $60 million, in 2025, according to Scott's website. Many generous gifts to minority colleges and universities In addition to at least $783 million Scott gave to historically Black colleges and universities in 2025, her website details many gifts to tribal colleges, community colleges and scholarship funds. “It looks like she sees a lot of need, particularly in two areas ensuring people are getting higher education and ensuring that groups are working to protect the climate,” said Fitzgerald. While Scott has given to higher education since 2020, those gifts have historically been a smaller portion of her education funding. In a 2024 analysis, Panorama Global found nearly 30% of Scott's education grantees were focused on youth development. Marybeth Gasman, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on HBCUs, said she noticed that what sets many of the HBCUs who receive Scott's funding apart from others is steady, consistent leadership and Gasman said, “She’s very interested in institutions that are rooted in community.” The value of unrestricted grants Scott does not put any conditions on her donations, allowing recipients to decide how and when to spend the funds. Unrestricted funding is rare from major donors and foundations, with many choosing to support very specific projects over specific timeframes. However, research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy in 2023 found that concerns about nonprofits misusing Scott's funds or growing unsustainably have largely not been born out. In part, that may be because Scott's team researches and vets groups extensively before making donations. Unrestricted gifts can help nonprofits weather disruptions, test new approaches or technologies or invest in the systems and infrastructure that underpin their work. For example, after the Trump administration cut funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nonprofit Village Enterprise, which runs antipoverty programs, used a grant it received from Scott in 2023 to keep essential programs running.Additionally, Scott allows groups the flexibility to decide whether to publicly share how much they've received, with more than a third of recipients in 2025 not disclosing the grant amounts in Scott's grant database. Fitzgerald said altgoether, she thinks Scott tries to not make her giving about herself. “In her essays, she’s always talking about other stakeholders and other people’s contributions," Fitzgerald said. "So it’s very different than many other philanthropists who are often the center of the story of their gift.” Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate

Education

Forests

Suggested Viewing

Inside The Grand Canyon

This guerrilla style documentary film captures a Colorado River rafting expedition through the Grand Canyon. Exhilarating and sometimes dangerous expeditions like this are not often considered when discussing global climate change but could be helpful to enlighten more folks about the changes to our planet. This rafting trip will soon be a thing of the past with record draughts continuing due to ongoing global climate change caused largely by humans. This is just a tiny slice of natures many warning signs of things to come. We find ourselves in a world of ongoing disbelief and hesitation in lieu of planning for the clear and present dangers from climate change. The Colorado River has already reached devastating levels for communities that depend on the water and electrical power resource. Government study in 2022 showed that Lake Powell could reach ""dead pool"" by 2023. There is no plan to mitigate the catastrophe that will leave over a million and a half people with no electricity.

Water

Climate

Sustainable

Silent Skies - The First Electric Plane Flyover

Silent Skies follows the groundbreaking journey of three Pennsylvania college students who orchestrated and piloted the first ever fully electric airplane stadium flyover. Stunning fans with a whisper-quiet show, this event signaled the dawn of America's transition to electric aviation. The students completed a record breaking trip flying the airplane from its base in Hartford, CT to the stadium in Easton, PA, recharging at enroute airports directly from a fleet of electric F-150 trucks. The air travel industry faces an unprecedented challenge: decarbonization. Historically, new aviation technologies are met with consumer skepticism. Demonstrating electric aircraft today, ahead of widespread adoption, is key for building consumer trust, political support, and sustained investment. The flyover was witnessed by 10,000+ attendees, thousands more on ESPN+ and created a precedent for the FAA to approve manned electric aircraft demonstrations over populated areas. Textron eAviation and Ford amplified the event through their social media channels and the film premiered at San Francisco Climate Week.

Technology

Transportation

Climate

Total Disaster

Armed with realistic bird puppets, trickster environmental activists pretend to be oil company Total—staging a satirical press conference to introduce "RéHabitat," a program to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats. Using humor and mischief, they expose a deadly ecological disaster in a zany effort to help #StopEACOP.

Activism

Energy

Animals

Chicken Soup for the Soil

Chicken Soup for the Soil follows the journey of North Carolina farmers Rachel Herrick and Suzanne Nelson Karreman as they work to rehabilitate farm soil ecosystems one pasture at a time. We learn that animals are not commodities and insects are not pests. They are partners in regenerating the soil. These are grassroots farms working with Nature to help Nature bounce back.

Land Use

Agriculture

Climate