Gender at the crossroads of mental health and climate change: A scoping review

The global intensification of environmental change and its resulting impacts on mental health are becoming increasingly evident, with gender mediating these outcomes. The primary goal of this scoping review is to highlight gender-specific mental health exposures and experiences in the face of climatic stressors. We further examine the role of climate responses in perpetuating climate-induced mental health impacts on men and women in existing literature. We synthesized studies published since 2010 using six electronic bibliographic databases. We identified 3640 studies, which were imported into Covidence, and only 43 studies were utilized to perform our analysis. The studies were spatially categorized based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) regions. Most of the studies were conducted in Australia and New Zealand (n = 9) and Central and Southern Asia (n = 9). Only seven studies explicitly indicated their guiding theoretical approaches or frameworks. Twenty-six studies focused on both men and women, fifteen on women only, and one on adolescents and children. No studies exclusively focused on men or included gender non-conforming, transgender, and non-binary individuals. A limited number of studies (13) applied longitudinal or time series approaches. Three main themes emerged: the gendered direct and indirect (violence, economic, food and water insecurities) mental health impacts (suicidality, suicide, stress), determinants of climate-induced mental health impacts (e.g., structural and social determinants), and adaptation interventions (e.g., coping strategies at and beyond the individual level and agency). Gendered factors identified include men and women's work, physical and reproductive health, sociocultural expectations or constraints and gender-blind initiatives. Findings suggest a need for context and gender-specific interventions to mitigate the impacts of climate change, particularly on mental health outcomes.