Eco-Anxiety and Solastalgia: the unseen climate harms demanding legal recognition

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Eponine Signe Noumbou, Attendee at the Nottingham Doctoral Symposium, member of the Hands on Heart Association and Women for Sustainable Energy and Climate Action

We see the images daily: forests reduced to ash, villages swallowed by rising seas, and cities choked by industrial smog. The physical devastation of the environmental crisis is undeniable. But beneath the surface of these visible scars lies a deeper, more insidious wound, a psychological toll that is increasingly being termed eco-anxiety (chronic fear of environmental doom) and solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change in one’s home environment).

Whilst the right to a healthy environment is now recognised by over 150 nations in both State Constitutions and through ongoing work to enshrine those rights into constitutional frameworks, our legal systems remain blind to important aspects of this silent epidemic. A ground breaking field of legal research is now asking a critical question: In an age of ecological collapse, is the profound mental distress caused by environmental degradation a violation of our fundamental human rights?

Understanding the Invisible Wounds

First coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia describes the distress we feel when our home environment is negatively transformed. It’s a form of homesickness while still at home. It’s the grief felt by Indigenous communities watching their ancestral forests cleared, or the despair of farming families whose fertile land has become barren due to prolonged drought. Eco-anxiety, on the other hand, is the chronic fear of environmental doom, the pervasive worry about the future in the face of escalating climate news. It’s not a clinical diagnosis but a rational response to a very real and existential threat, particularly acute among younger generations. For too long, these experiences have been dismissed as personal anxieties. But as the research shows, they are direct, foreseeable consequences of environmental destruction and government inaction. The legal frontier is now shifting to acknowledge that the right to a "healthy environment" must include mental well-being.

The African Paradox: Strong Laws, Silent Suffering

Nowhere is the urgency to address this issue greater than in Africa, a continent disproportionately burdened by climate change despite contributing minimally to its causes. The legal foundations for protection are already in place: The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights enshrines both the right to health and the right to a satisfactory environment. Countries like Kenya, South Africa, and Cameroon have woven these rights into their very constitutions. Yet, as legal scholars note, African jurisprudence has yet to explicitly connect environmental degradation to psychological harm. The focus remains overwhelmingly on physical health and ecological damage. The potential is immense; the Kampala Convention, the African Union's landmark treaty on internally displaced persons, explicitly includes those displaced by "natural or human-made disasters" and mandates "psychosocial counselling". This creates a direct legal pathway to address the trauma of communities forced from their lands by climate-driven droughts or floods.

Why, then, the silence in courtrooms? The barriers are significant, proving a direct causal link between a specific polluter and a community's collective depression is a formidable evidentiary challenge. Furthermore, many governments, focused on rapid economic development, prioritize industrial growth over ecological and psychosocial well-being.

A Global Shift: The Law Catches Up to Reality

While African legal systems grapple with these concepts, the rest of the world is beginning to set powerful precedents; the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that Switzerland’s inadequate climate policies violated the human right to private and family life, explicitly acknowledging the psychological distress caused by the government's failure to act. Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires that an applicant must be a "victim" of the alleged violation; in Verein Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland the ECtHR considered that the applicants satisfied Article 34 because the applicant was a non-profit association, of Swiss women aged 64 and over, whose primary goal was to advocate for robust climate protection. The fact that the association had a specific, dedicated purpose focused on climate change and it possessed the necessary expertise meant that it could act in a representative capacity. Not only did the association have standing to bring a claim, the ECtHR found a breach of Article 8 which protects the right to respect for private and family life, the home and correspondence. Per the ECtHR; “Article 8 encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life" so, Switzerland had positive obligations under Article 8 to take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect the applicants from the serious adverse effects of climate change. This was not about guaranteeing a perfect climate, but about putting in place a regulatory framework that provides effective protection; this ruling echoed a global trend. In Latin America, The Agreement has provisions to protect environmental defenders, which may be interpreted to include the protection of their mental health. Even India's National Green Tribunal has compensated citizens for psychological harm from pollution.

These developments provide a toolkit for African activists and lawyers to argue that if other continents can protect their citizens from climate-related distress, then Africa should do the same.

The Path Forward: From Recognition to Redress

So, how do we translate this growing awareness into tangible legal protection? The journey involves several key steps:

Activists and lawyers must bring test cases before African regional courts and national supreme courts. This will build on precedents like the South Africa’s coal-fired power case. In this landmark case, the High Court of South Africa invalidated the government's plan to build 1,500 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants. The judge ruled that this decision harmed the environment and, in doing so, violated fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The judge explicitly linked environmental destruction to a violation of constitutional rights, including: The right to a healthy environment (section 24 of the Constitution), the right to health of the population, particularly children (whose best interests are a primary consideration, section 28), and the rights to life and dignity. The Court found that the government had failed to fulfil its constitutional obligations by making such a damaging decision without considering its impact on citizens' rights. This ruling sets a strong precedent in South Africa ensuring that environmental protection is not a secondary issue, but an essential condition for guaranteeing human rights for current and future generations. The court clearly condemned an environmentally harmful project because it threatened the health and well-being of the population.

Similarly, Nigeria’s Ogoni case, demonstrates that new lawsuits can also strategically include claims for psychological damages, forcing judges to interpret the right to health and a healthy environment in a more holistic way.

Governments must be pushed to reform Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). These crucial regulatory tools currently assess physical damage to air, water, and biodiversity but almost universally ignore the potential psychosocial impacts of projects like mines or dams on local communities. Cameroon, often called "Africa in miniature," possesses immense natural resources (oil, timber, minerals, and hydropower potential) and the government's ambitious 2035 Emergence Strategy heavily promotes large-scale infrastructure and extractive projects to drive economic growth, creating immediate and intense pressure on land and communities as is apparent in The Lom Pangar Dam and Hydropower Projects (Eastern Region). While EIAs focused on reservoir size and wildlife displacement, they largely ignored the profound cultural and mental health impacts on the indigenous Baka and other local communities. However, the psychological impact noted by numerous civil society organizations campaigning for the preservation of indigenous peoples' rights is real. The inundation of ancestral forests severs a spiritual and physical connection to the land; for hunter-gatherer communities like the Baka, the forest is their supermarket, pharmacy, and cathedral. Its loss triggers cultural disintegration, existential grief, and solastalgia. This leads to depression, and associated conditions and a loss of intergenerational knowledge as elders can no longer teach youth traditional ways.

Jurists cannot do this alone, they must collaborate with psychologists, public health experts, and climate scientists to build robust, evidence-based cases that can overcome the causation hurdle so, effectively documenting the mental health footprint of environmental destruction is essential.

Learning from Indigenous Wisdom is also important. Concepts like Ubuntu in Southern Africa, which emphasizes our interconnectedness, offer a powerful cultural framework for understanding solastalgia. The law must learn to value the profound connection between cultural identity, mental well-being, and the land, a connection that indigenous scholars like Kyle Powys Whyte argue has been severed by a long history of colonial and environmental injustice.

Conclusion: A Right to Psychological Well-Being

The fight to have eco-anxiety and solastalgia legally recognised is more than an academic exercise; it is a fight for human dignity in a deteriorating world. As the great Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai reminds us, “Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect”.

The legal recognition of these psychological harms would be a revolutionary step, it would affirm that the trauma of a farmer losing his livelihood to desertification and deforestation is as real as physical injury, and that the fear of young activists for their future is a legitimate claim against government inaction. By expanding our understanding of human rights to include protection from environmental mental distress, we can build a legal system that is truly fit for the challenges of the 21st century and ensure that justice encompasses the mind as well as the body.

Eco-Anxiety and Solastalgia: the unseen climate harms demanding legal recognition

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