Environmental change is not just an outside story. It shows up in how people feel, think, and cope. The word many researchers now use for that distress is “solastalgia.” It describes pain tied to unwanted changes in the places people call home.
The term blends solace and nostalgia. It was introduced to capture the ache people report when their familiar landscapes transform in ways they did not choose or expect.
It focuses on present loss, not longing for the past in general. The emphasis is on disruption where someone still lives, not homesickness after moving away.
The new scoping review comes from a group of researchers affiliated with the University of Zurich. The authors followed a formal approach for scoping reviews and mapped the evidence on solastalgia and mental health from 2003 through September 2024.
Solastalgia – where, when, how
A single paper cannot explain every emotional response to climate and ecological shifts. It can, however, show patterns across places and methods.
This review did that by assembling 19 studies that referenced solastalgia and measured mental health in some way, across Australia, Germany, Peru, the United States, and additional countries.
The authors first required tools that explicitly measured solastalgia and paired them with validated mental health scales.
They then broadened the net to include studies that discussed both topics even when the solastalgia tool was not present.
That mixed approach helps when a field is young. It also keeps the focus on what is reproducible across different communities.
What solastalgia studies found
A scoping review reports consistent links between solastalgia and mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and somatisation.
Across the five quantitative studies in the core set, correlations with depression and anxiety typically fell in the small to moderate range, and two studies also found similar sized links with PTSD.
In communities living near a continuously expanding open pit mine in Germany, the reported correlations with depression and anxiety were in the 0.35 to 0.53 range.
That was higher than values observed after discrete events such as fires or floods. One U.S. study tied every 1 point rise on a solastalgia scale to a 26 percent increase in the odds of psychological distress.
Why long change hits harder
Associations tended to be stronger when environmental loss was prolonged or clearly human caused. One time disasters, while severe, often produced smaller correlations with mental health outcomes in these datasets.
That pattern fits a broader trauma literature where repeated or interpersonal harms often predict more persistent symptoms than single incidents.
“Solastalgia might be a factor contributing to the detrimental effects of climate change on mental health,” stated Alicia Vela Sandquist, lead author of the scoping review.
The authors summarized their conclusion in plain language in the paper’s front matter. That statement reflects the weight of the included evidence, while still noting that the studies were observational.
Why solastalgia matters
Climate change already affects mental health through direct events, economic and social stressors, and disruptions to safety and identity.
Solastalgia helps name an important part of that picture. It links place based loss to specific symptoms, which moves conversations from vague worry to measurable risks.
The review looked at outcomes such as depressive symptoms, anxiety, PTSD, and physical symptoms that track with psychological stress. It also flagged lower well being, pessimism, and reduced resilience in several studies.
Together, these measures sketch a consistent profile. The pattern is not uniform everywhere, but the direction of association rarely flips.
Why the pattern likely happens
One suggested pathway is learned helplessness, a response that can arise when people feel they have little control over outcomes, which is common when large scale environmental forces reshape daily life.
The review also notes that cultural ties to land can amplify distress when those ties are disrupted. That matters for indigenous communities, farmers, and others whose identity is rooted in specific places.
Researchers have built several tools to assess this form of distress, including the Environmental Distress Scale (EDS), the Scale of Solastalgia (SOS), and the Brief Solastalgia Scale (BSS).
Those instruments let teams track associations with health outcomes in a comparable way. They also support work on thresholds and change over time, which is essential for planning services.
What this means for services
The evidence suggests that screening for solastalgia in affected regions could help identify people at higher risk of mental health problems.
That may include communities facing chronic drought, repeated wildfire smoke seasons, or long running industrial expansion.
Clinicians and public health planners can then match support to the type of stressor, since prolonged loss often calls for different strategies than single event response.
Most included studies were cross sectional. That design cannot nail down cause or timing, so stronger designs will be needed to map the order of events and the durability of symptoms.
There were also fewer quantitative papers than expected given how widely the concept appears in public discussion.
Longitudinal work can track solastalgia before and after major environmental changes. Quasi-experimental designs can compare affected and unaffected regions that are otherwise similar.
Codesigned studies will matter in indigenous and non Western contexts, so that instruments capture what loss of place means locally rather than importing outside assumptions.
Eco emotions and mental health
Solastalgia is one of several eco emotions, alongside eco anxiety and eco grief. It does not replace those ideas, and it does not cover every mental health pathway tied to environmental change.
It focuses on distress linked to alterations in one’s home environment. That specificity is a strength for measurement, not a claim that other effects are secondary.
Naming and measuring a risk makes it far easier to plan for it. Health systems can estimate potential demand, community groups can design supports, and leaders can factor mental health into adaptation plans.
It also gives residents language to describe what they are experiencing without pathologizing reasonable concern.
People notice when their landscapes shift in ways that feel unsafe or unfamiliar. The review shows that this experience is not just poetic, it correlates with measurable mental health outcomes across different settings.
The study is published in BMJ Mental Health.
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