If Adelaide is selected to host COP31, it will be an opportunity to centre the lived experience of climate breakdown, which is evident across South Australia, according to the authors below.
“Climate change is not only a scientific and technical crisis. It is also a cultural, emotional, and psychological rupture,” they say.
“To face it fully, we must protect not just species and infrastructure, but the stories, places, and traditions that give meaning to our lives and make us happy.”
The authors are Dr Ania Kotarba-Morley, Dr Phillipa McCormack, Associate Professor Toby Freeman, Professor Fran Baum, Dr Scott Hanson-Easey, Professor Jon Jureidini, Rosemary Wanganeen, Associate Professor Carmel Williams, Dr Bronwyn Gresham, Christie Wilson, Professor Patrick O’Connor, Dr Akwasi Ampofo, Professor Tracy Ireland, and Professor Ian Lilley (full details at end of article).
Ania Kotarba-Morley, Phillipa McCormack and others write:
If Adelaide is chosen to host COP31 in 2026, climate negotiations will rightly feature decarbonisation, emissions targets, and energy transitions. But they must also centre the lived experience of climate breakdown – particularly the psychological and cultural impacts already being felt by those on the frontlines, including our Pacific neighbours.
The plight of Pacific Islanders in nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, will likely be central to the COP31 agenda if the meeting is held in Australia. Rising seas are swallowing ancestral lands, washing away graveyards, disrupting food systems, and cutting off access to ceremonial sites.
These are not just environmental or infrastructural losses – they are deeply personal and cultural, and research shows that they are triggering grief, anxiety, and fractured intergenerational ties.
Their experience offers a stark warning of the climate-driven displacement, cultural loss, and mental health impacts that could unfold elsewhere, including in South Australia, where most of our team live.
Across South Australia, climate change is not only degrading biodiversity and landscapes – it’s eroding the emotional foundations of people’s lives. This kind of damage is often less visible, but no less devastating. It affects how people relate to their environment, their community, and their own sense of belonging.
For many survivors of natural disasters such as bushfires, the deepest grief is felt at a loss of the irreplaceable things that carry memory and meaning. It’s the music box passed on from the grandmother, a grandfather’s watch, a child’s favourite toy, or a decades-old (and not digitised) family album.
These are not just personal belongings – they are fragments of culture, lived history, and identity. Recognising their importance, some communities are already taking steps to protect them. In one village in the Adelaide Hills, for example, a small volunteer-run museum has launched a digitisation program to preserve old photographs, “so that they are recorded if the fire comes”.
Similar goes for community landmarks and heritage sites such as local church, a graveyard, a museum or a cherished landscape with deeper, intangible meaning to the community.
Grassroots initiatives like the Climate Cafés run by Psychology for a Safe Climate are trying to fill in the gap where overwhelmed and underfunded mental health services fail or stumble, but they seem like a proverbial ‘drop in the ocean’ in an accelerating crisis of climate disaster induced mental health decline.
The story from South Australia
South Australia’s most recent State of the Environment report paints a troubling picture.
Over 12 percent of the state’s species are now threatened with extinction. Wetlands, coasts, forests, and arid lands are in ongoing decline.
For the first time, the report includes a ‘liveability’ indicator, recognising that human health and wellbeing are deeply connected to the protection of nature. Yet our legal frameworks have not caught up.
Climate, cultural heritage, biodiversity, and public health remain siloed – separately legislated, managed, and usually competing for funding.
This fragmentation has real consequences. Despite multiple laws and policies – national parks legislation, threatened species listings, cultural heritage protections – climate change impact continues to outpace these tools.
Cultural sites are being lost before they’re even documented. Ecosystems collapse while government departments debate jurisdiction. Meanwhile, communities are left dealing with the emotional toll, including grief and trauma of losing the places that anchor them.
The psychological impacts of this loss are increasingly being recognised. The terms solastalgia and ecological grief describe the distress people experience when their familiar environments change disappear or are threatened.
Community responses
In South Australia, these feelings are already widespread.
In the Adelaide Hills, people report anxiety triggered by hot days, the scent of smoke, or the sound of sirens – reminders of the 2019 Cudlee Creek bushfire. Community members in the Hills reported crying when the first rain came recently after months of anxiety-inducing drought.
Along the flood-prone Murray River, community members feel raising pangs of anxiety at a sound of raindrops.
On Kangaroo Island, which experienced a devastating bushfire in 2020, many speak of the grief they feel for landscapes that “will never be the same.”
And along the coast of Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide and in the Ngarrindjeri culturally significant and RAMSAR listed Coroong, toxic algal blooms – driven by rising sea temperatures and shifting ocean currents – are causing distress among coastal residents, fishers and visitors alike.
The loss of nature and heritage is not a niche mental health issue. These experiences point to broader public health risks as climate breakdown accelerates.
A significant body of research shows that the destruction or degradation of heritage – whether natural or cultural, tangible or intangible – can disrupt identity, fracture social cohesion, and contribute to depression, anxiety, and trauma.
The burden is especially severe for First Nations communities, for whom connection to Country is spiritual, relational, and fundamental to wellbeing.
Yet, despite these impacts, current mental health responses tend to individualise – and medicalise – distress, rather than addressing the structural community-scale drivers behind it, and developing collective rather than individualised responses.
Without acknowledging the role of place and heritage, we risk pathologising normal human responses to loss – offering treatment for symptoms without addressing their source.
Current legal frameworks
There are signs of progress though. South Australia’s new Biodiversity Bill, introduced in 2024, is the first legislation in the state to acknowledge the significance of climate change for ecosystems and the vital role of First Nations knowledge in caring for Country.
This is an important step, but the Bill does not yet recognise the broader significance of natural and cultural heritage to public health – or the compounding and cascading harms caused by its loss.
Meanwhile, legal precedents are emerging internationally and nationally that could reshape how we think about these issues.
In 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Australia’s inaction on climate change violated the rights of Torres Strait Islanders, including their rights to enjoy culture and live free from interference in private and family life. Rising seas, storm surges, and coastal erosion have destroyed traditional food sources and family graves, leading to what the Committee deemed a breach of international obligations.
A second legal case, known as Pabai Pabai and Guy Paul Kabai v. Commonwealth of Australia – currently before the Federal Court – asks whether the Australian Government has a duty of care to protect the Torres Strait from climate harms.
If successful, this case could lay the foundation for a wave of legal claims by native title holders across the country for cultural damage caused by fires, floods, and other climate-related events. It is believed that increase in climate litigation may also catalyse significant legal reform and climate change action.
Opportunity
If Adelaide hosts the COP31, let’s talk about what matters to people – traditions, heritage and their mental and physical wellbeing.
All of this points to a moment of opportunity.
As climate-driven loss intensifies, we must begin to treat heritage protection as a form of climate adaptation – and as a vital part of public health policy.
If Adelaide hosts COP31, it can be the city that brings these threads together. Not just emissions and energy, but memory, identity, and care.
Climate change is not only a scientific and technical crisis. It is also a cultural, emotional, and psychological rupture.
To face it fully, we must protect not just species and infrastructure, but the stories, places, and traditions that give meaning to our lives and make us happy.
If we don’t, we risk losing more than landscapes. We risk losing the sense of who we are.
Author details
Dr Ania Kotarba-Morley is a Future Making Fellow at The University of Adelaide. She is an Archaeologist and Cultural Heritage professional whose current research focuses on protection, management, and documentation (by means of ‘community archaeology’) of cultural heritage vulnerable to damage and destruction due to climate change and extreme weather events. She currently leads a project: Preserving Heritage, Promoting Wellbeing: Building Healthy Societies by Addressing Eco-Anxiety and Trauma from Climate Change-Induced Loss of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Sites. See more here.
Dr Phillipa McCormack is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide. Her current project, titled: ‘Preparing Australia for a fiery future: Strategies to guide law reform’, focuses on facilitating climate adaptation through law as extreme fires become larger, more frequent and more destructive. See more here.
Associate Professor Toby Freeman is an Associate Professor and Director of Research at Stretton Health Equity, University of Adelaide. His research expertise is in health inequities, and the social and commercial determinants of health. See more here.
Professor Fran Baum AO is Director of Stretton Health Equity, University of Adelaide and an NHMRC Investigator Fellow. Her research concerns the social and commercial determinants of health equity and sustainability. See more here.
Dr Scott Hanson-Easey is a Senior Lecturer and social psychologist in the School of Public Health at The University of Adelaide. His research explores how diverse communities make sense of and respond to health risks, with a particular focus on those arising from anthropogenic climate change. See more here.
Professor Jon Jureidini is a child psychiatrist who also trained in philosophy (PhD, Flinders University), critical appraisal (University of British Columbia) and psychotherapy (Tavistock Clinic). He heads Adelaide University’s Critical and Ethical Mental Health research group (CEMH), and the Paediatric Mental Health Training Unit (PMHTU. See more here.
Rosemary Wanganeen is a proud South Australian Aboriginal woman with cultural ties to the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and the Koogatha and Wirangu peoples of the West Coast. In 1993, she founded the Healing Centre for Griefology, which specialises in a culturally appropriate and sensitive counselling model called Griefology. It is a unique, evidence-based approach integrating Aboriginal and Western worldviews of loss and grief. She is currently pursuing a Master of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide.
Associate Professor Carmel Williams is Director of the Centre for Health in All Policies Research Translation based in South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute and the School of Public Health at the University of Adelaide. See more here.
Dr Bronwyn Gresham was appointed as CEO of Psychology for a Safe Climate in October 2023, having been a longstanding member and volunteer with PSC since 2012. She is a registered clinical psychologist and facilitator, who has worked across the community health, private practice and university sectors in clinical services, advisory, leadership, strategic planning, risk management, mental health promotion and prevention. See more here.
Christie Wilson is a registered psychotherapist and the Climate and Mental Health Manager at Psychology for a Safe Climate, since 2022, where she leads the Climate-Aware therapist Professional Development and Climate Café programs. She has extensive experience facilitating trauma-informed group processes around climate emotions and supporting climate leaders’ mental health. See more here.
Professor Patrick O’Connor AM is Director of the Centre for Global Food and Resources and Professor in the School of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Adelaide. He is a leader in bringing the tools of economics to the challenges of biodiversity loss, ecosystem service degradation and climate change. See more here.
Dr Akwasi Ampofo is a Lecturer at the University of Adelaide’s School of Economics and Public Policy. His research bridges health, labour, environment, resource, and development economics. See more here.
Professor Tracy Ireland is Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Canberra and is known internationally for her work on ‘everyday heritage’, the ethics of conservation and the social value of heritage. Tracy is the immediate past President of Australia ICOMOS, Editor of Historic Environment and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London. See more here.
Professor Ian Lilley is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. He was the inaugural Willem Willems Chair for Contemporary Issues in Archaeological Heritage Management at Leiden University in the Netherlands. See more here.
Also read: In a country wedded to fossil fuels, what would an Australia-Pacific climate conference look like? By Isabelle Zhu-Maguire
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