When Hurricane Helene hit Florida on September 26, Fort Meyers resident Katie Johnson, a 37-year-old maths professor and mother of two, had already been living in temporary housing since losing nearly everything two years prior. During Hurricane Ian, her one-storey house, where she lived with her husband and children, was submerged in more than a metre of floodwater and mud. 'Furniture, appliances, clothes, books, family heirlooms, almost everything was gone,' she describes. 'The cleanup was miserable. We tried to sell the house six times before deciding to stay this summer and renovate. Helene was a huge surprise.'
Far from the hurricane’s projected landfall and without evacuation recommendations, Johnson and her family stayed. 'It didn’t even rain that day,' she says. 'The storm surge caught everyone off guard. We lost both of our cars. Our house and garage flooded again, and a lot of what survived Ian was destroyed.'
Days later, in the historic waterfront town of Marshall, North Carolina, author and teacher Asia Suler, 37, describes a 'slow-motion shattering' when she realised her town and her business of nine years, One Willow Apothecaries, was destroyed. After Helene battered Florida’s coast, it barrelled northward, dumping unprecedented rainfall and causing catastrophic flooding in the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Water from the French Broad River rose to the second floor of the building where Suler’s apothecary was located, flooding it with polluted water and sediment, wrecking furniture and poisoning bottles of herbal medicine, she’d prepared with care. 'Everything was covered in at least a foot of gelatinous muck that smelled like decay,' she recalls. 'It was a mix of sewage, petrol, and chemicals from the entire city of Asheville and a plastics plant that imploded. Just pure destruction.' Many are still without water for the foreseeable future. And at the time of this writing, the number of people missing, and the death toll, continue to rise.
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Less than two weeks later, on October 7, Florida meteorologist John Morales broke down on air while describing the growing ferocity of another hurricane on the way: Milton, the ninth to form over the Atlantic this year and one of the most rapidly intensifying on record. Just days after he’d penned an op-ed about how 40 years of witnessing extreme weather events from global warming had changed him, Morales was visibly emotional. 'I apologise,' his voice hitched as he hung his head, an ominous blot of red churning across the screen beside him, 'this is just horrific.' It was whirling straight toward communities that had only begun to assess Helene’s devastation just days prior.
When it made landfall over the sandy island of Siesta Key, sending a dozen tornadoes ripping across the state, Johnson and her family had managed to evacuate, but their house flooded with more than 12 inches of water again. Born and raised in western Florida, Johnson has lived in Fort Meyers since 2012, where she hoped to stay 'forever.' Living through the growing threats of the climate crisis now means certain displacement. 'We haven’t had a normal living situation in over two years and soon this will be a reality for many others too,' she explains. 'When you’re dealing with the climate crisis daily, it’s much harder to go about your life and ignore how imminent it is. It’s hard to stay positive.'
A World Bank report estimates that by 2050, more than 200 million people like Johnson and her family will be displaced by climate-related events. But you don’t have to live in a disaster area to be impacted by the realities of the climate crisis. With extreme weather events like deadly cyclones, heat waves, wildfires, and floods increasing in every corner of the world, climate-related anxiety and displacement are the new norm.
'Watching these floods in North Carolina, listening to the accounts of survivors, can be as traumatising psychologically for people here in the UK as it is for people in North America,' says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Bath. 'We are not protected from the impact of witnessing what’s going on around the world.'
Part of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a collective of psychologists helping people cope with climate anxiety, Hickman says it’s important not to pathologise this as mental illness. 'Feeling anxious about climate change is a sign of mental health. It shows you care.'
Still, Carbon Brief reports that women’s mental health is disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, including experiences of grief, depression, and PTSD. 'Everyone is being forced to come to grips with environmental issues because climate change is hitting everywhere,' says Dr. Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist based in Oregon who specialises in climate. 'Whatever stress you have in your life—whether it’s economic or relational or meeting basic needs for food, water, shelter, and clothing — climate change makes everything worse. For women, that includes the challenges of caring for your family, keeping your children safe, deciding whether you’re going to have children, and emotional labour [which is often inordinately performed by women and other disadvantaged groups].'
A Yale School of Public Health study suggests that collective action helps people cope. In people aged 18 to 35, only those who didn’t engage in community efforts to address climate change felt depressed.
Susan Solomon, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again, has seen firsthand how people can force significant change to reverse environmental threats. In 1986, she led an expedition to Antarctica, where her team discovered the link between an ever-widening hole in the ozone layer and industrial emissions of CFCs worldwide. That work became instrumental in a global ban on ozone-depleting substances outlined in the Montreal Protocol.
'Although this problem is a massively heavy lift,' she says, 'we must look at our past successes in other environmental problems. Concerned women have played an outsized role in enacting change in many of them. For example, when it came to dealing with smog, which was a massive problem both in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, some of the first action taken was by women in Los Angeles: mothers who became completely incensed that the air was so polluted, children were being rushed to the hospital with asthma attacks in larger numbers.'
Distressed women, she explains, began the fight against the auto industry, the most profitable in the United States at the time, which led to passing the Clean Air Act. 'You see the same things happening now with smog in India and China: public demand is one of the biggest movers. We shouldn’t just curl up in a ball and say there’s nothing we can do because we have done things in the past.'
Environmental activist Leah Thomas, who founded the non-profit Intersectional Environmentalist, agrees: 'We’re bombarded day in and day out with the horrible realities of the climate crisis, but we don’t always hear about organisations that have solutions and just need resources, amplification, and support. The best action people can take is connecting with organisations in their community and following their lead.'
While many feel overwhelmed and powerless to take on the politicians and corporations who must act now to remediate the climate emergency, Suler reflects that individual action is as important as lobbying. 'I’m witnessing this now on the ground [in North Carolina], how every single person is showing up in unique and different ways. Not everyone’s going to be on the ground shovelling muck. People are holding other people in grief, making food, singing songs that are breaking people’s hearts open and getting them to really show up for this moment. That is what will shift the tide here on this planet.'
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