Solastalgia

A second distinction runs alongside. Solastalgia is the lived experience of unwelcome change happening now. Eco-anxiety is worry about what may happen later, and has been associated with pre-traumatic stress by analogy with post-traumatic stress. The construction is a portmanteau. Latin supplies the first half, either sōlācium for solace and comfort or solus for desolation, and either way the freight it carries is devastation, comfort taken away, abandonment, loneliness. Greek supplies the second half, -algia, for pain and suffering and grief.

Global climate change is the usual reference, but local events do it too: a volcanic eruption, a drought, a destructive mining method More recent work has extended it to historic heritage under threat from the climate crisis, naming Venice, Amsterdam and Hội An.

Where it was first measured

Albrecht and colleagues published on two Australian contexts in 2007:

• persistent drought in rural New South Wales
• large-scale open-cut coal mining in the Upper Hunter Valley In both, the negative reactions came from a sense of powerlessness over changes that were unfolding regardless. What the communities described losing was certainty in an environment that had been predictable, and that loss of certainty is the common thread.

The Lancet included it in 2015 as a contributing concept in the effect of climate change on human health and wellbeing, and a review has since covered fifteen years of scholarship on how the relationship is understood, measured and felt.

There is a temporal dimension as well. Experiencing unwelcome environmental change has been linked to increased anticipation of further change to come, and that anticipation carries higher reported symptoms of anxiety, post-traumatic stress and anger.

When the distress helps

Research indicates the distress can be adaptive when it drives people to seek comfort together. Processed collectively, in conversation that allows the emotion to be worked through and reflective capacity to increase, it can produce resilience and growth rather than only damage. The same is true of the other climate-related emotions.

Who gets it

Occupation predicts a great deal. Hedda Haugen Askland describes distress arising where a society lacks social and political interaction of the kind that shapes a community's experience. Where a living does not depend much on the surrounding environment, the term rarely gets expressed at all. Where it does depend on it, vulnerability rises, and it rises furthest among groups whose livelihood rests on agroecosystems. Africa supplies many examples, where agrarian communities have lost vital resources to environmental change, with a rise in the number of environmental refugees following.

Wealth predicts the rest. A study in the western United States found that after a destructive wildfire, higher-income families experienced the effects significantly less than their lower-income neighbours, and the reason given is flexibility: money made it possible to move or to rebuild, which removed the uncertainty the fire had created. Other studies support the same pattern in Appalachian communities affected by mountain-top removal coal mining, where communities close to the mining sites had significantly higher depression rates than those further away.