The mental health toll of climate change across Türkiye, Australia, and the Pacific
World leaders are meeting in Antalya for COP31.
This year’s conference brings together an unusual partnership: Türkiye hosts, Australia leads the negotiations, and the pre-COP took place in the Pacific, with meetings in Fiji and a leaders’ gathering in Tuvalu.
The countries shaping COP31 are also living with the consequences of climate change. For the people in these stories, it is not an abstract future threat. It is the lost crop, the cattle growing thin, the rain that does not come, the sea edging closer to the door, and the anxiety that follows them home.
Mental health must be on the table in Antalya.
When the seasons stop making sense
Climate change affects mental health in many interconnected ways. Floods, droughts, extreme heat and rising seas can contribute to anxiety, depression and despair. They threaten homes and livelihoods, drive debt and fracture communities.
For people whose identity is tied to land or sea passed down through generations, the loss goes far beyond income or property.
From farming families in Türkiye, to cotton and cattle farmers in rural Australia, and Pacific Island communities in Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati, the people we spoke to describe a strikingly similar pattern.
It is not one disaster, but the swing between extremes: too much water, then too little, and seasons that no longer arrive when expected. The strain spikes when catastrophe strikes, but it builds while people wait for rain, watch their families struggle and wonder whether they will be forced to uproot their lives.
These are their stories.
Can we create a future in which climate change does not sever the connection between people, their land, and the generations who will inherit it?
Psychiatrist, Çukurova, Türkiye
According to the Turkish State Meteorological Service, 2024 was the hottest year since national records began in Türkiye, and 2025 was the driest since 1964, with rainfall 27.6% below normal.
On the Konya Plain in Central Anatolia, decades of pumping groundwater for irrigation, along with falling rain and snow, have driven the water level down by tens of metres. The ground is giving way: Türkiye’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) has counted 684 sinkholes across the plain. Meke Lake, a volcanic crater lake known locally as the world’s evil eye bead, dried up completely in 2020.
Further south, on the Mediterranean plain of Çukurova, farmers endured drought in 2025, followed by heavy rain and flooding in 2026.
Farmer and livestock breeder, Konya
As a child, Fatma saw knee-deep snow every winter. “That snow was our hope.” Now, it melts before reaching the ground. Four years ago, when a rain-fed cereal crop failed to grow, she let a friend graze his sheep and goats on the field. “That day, I said to myself, ‘The system is collapsing.’”
Video credit: Harun Meral.
Farmer and livestock breeder, Konya
Women, she says, feel water shortages most acutely because they depend on water at home as well as on the farm. This year, her kitchen garden yielded nothing. “We feel we have failed. But these are things beyond our control.”
Her animals give her the strength to carry on. “When a calf comes into the world, I am brought back to life with the will to produce. You see an animal that has just opened its eyes to the world, and it has no one but you.”
Photo: Fatma in the barn. Credit: Harun Meral.
Farmer, Çukurova
At the end of May, Mustafa toured the family’s fields by tractor and filmed what he saw: wheat flattened by the wind, peanut fields swamped by weeds, and plots still unsown because the ground was too wet to work.
Video credit: Dr. Tuna Eker.
Psychiatrist, Çukurova, Türkiye
The women in the family rarely drive the tractors or decide when to irrigate, but they share the financial uncertainty, and see the worry weighing on their husbands and sons.
But the family is not giving up.
“These lands are us. We will not leave.” - The Eker family.
Photo: Mustafa and Bülent check the maize.
Credit: Dr. Tuna Eker.
In June, the Bureau of Meteorology declared El Niño underway, which often brings drier conditions to eastern Australia in winter and spring.
Distances are vast and services are thin. In remote Australia, there are about a third as many psychologists per person as in the major cities. In some communities, finding someone to talk to about mental health means a long journey from home.
Max McCartney,
Fifth generation cattle farmer, Moura
This year, most of the rain fell in January and February. Since early March, there has been almost none. The grass has stopped growing, and the cattle are growing thin.
Feeding the herd costs money he may never make back. Hardest of all is the feeling that he is failing the animals in his care, even when the conditions are beyond his control.
Video credit: Ava Haine.
What keeps him going is pride in what he raises. When he sells a line of cattle, he wants to be proud of them, and to know the buyers are happy too. And he still holds hope for those who come after him: “We want to push to make it better for our next generations.”
Photo: Max on his farm. Credit: Ava Haine.
Cattle farmer, Moura
Cotton-farmer-to-be, Moura
The weather creeps into every conversation. “You start with ‘How ya going?’, then the next question is ‘Have you had any rain?’“ The family’s paddock runs alongside a highway, where a single spark from a passing car could set it alight, generating fear among Amelia's family in dry periods.
Photo: The cotton fields flooded and in drought. Credit: Ava Haine.
Getting help can be difficult. During the floods, the family struggled to get basic supplies. “In our town there is no doctor, no bank, no grocer… so we definitely don’t have the privilege of a psychologist.”
Her friends help lift her spirits. Their families are bonded by the same experience, and even now, they still manage to have a laugh together.
And she still wants to farm.
Stories from the Pacific
In Fiji, rising seas have already forced whole villages to move. Vunidogoloa, on Vanua Levu, became the first to relocate, in 2014, and dozens more have been identified as needing to follow.
Youth leader, Fiji
The land and ocean mean everything to her. They provide food, income and a home for families, while connecting people to their culture, traditions and identity. When the land and ocean suffer, the whole community feels the impact.
Video credit: Litiana Lagibalavu.
For generations, families here have farmed and fished according to traditional knowledge of the seasons. Now, that knowledge is starting to fail. The rains and the good fishing no longer come as they used to. The heat is rising, storms are stronger, the coast is eroding, and fish are harder to find.
When a crop fails or the fish don’t come, the pressure lands on families. Women, she says, carry much of the load: the household, the cooking, and the care of children and older relatives. Some young people feel they will have to leave the islands to find work or study, though many would rather stay and be part of the solution.
After a disaster, people pull together to clean up, repair homes and share food. But the stress, sadness and uncertainty linger, and help from beyond the village, from health care to transport and money, is hard to reach. Winnie wants to see stronger mental health and community support in the aftermath of climate disasters.
Photo: Winnie on her land in Navuola Village.
Credit: Litiana Lagibalavu.
Youth activist, Fiji
Climate activist, Tuvalu
Mililani has lived in Funafuti, the capital, since birth. Its land and sea are home and heritage, a link to her tupuga, her ancestors. The place her heart sings.
She was 15 when the scale of the crisis hit. Now she watches the land narrow, and the sea creep closer. The places she grew up, played and swam as a child are changing before her eyes. When the sea takes them, she says, it feels like losing pieces of herself. Her generation is inheriting not only the impacts of climate change, but the responsibility to respond.
In 2025, Australia opened a climate visa for Tuvaluans under the Falepili Union treaty. More than 5,000 people, nearly half the population, entered the first ballot. Mililani feels that pull.
She draws strength from faith and Tu Faka-Tuvalu, the collective values of sharing and caring for one another. But resilience, she insists, should not mean Tuvaluans are simply expected to keep adapting to worsening conditions.
Photo: Mililani Homasi and Tapua Pasuna (former Miss Tuvalu) planting a coconut seedling on the Reclamation Land TCAP as part of the Environment Week activities.
Credit: Department of Environment.
Climate activist, Tuvalu
Farmer and fisherman, Kiribati
When he was young, bonefish swam close to shore. Now they are rare, and he has to take a steel boat out past the reef to bring home the week’s catch.
Coconut palms are dying. The wells have turned salty, so the family buys costly imported water. “We are sometimes forced to drink bad water,” he says. “Our body is not built for saltwater.” Babies and the frail fall sick first.
Photo: Tuvalu shoreline. Credit: John Itaaka.
He has lifted his crops into raised beds, out of reach of the salt, and he leans on the old ways. When a family is in need, neighbours still share and barter so that no one goes without. Manikaoti is proud of the communal life that holds them together.
Photo: Manikaoti Timeon in Nanikaai, South Tarawa.
Credit: John Itaaka.
Farmer and fisherman, Tuvalu
From Konya to Kiribati and back, climate change is taking a toll on people’s mental health.
In Antalya, leaders can choose to protect it. Read our COP31 asks here.
This photoessay was developed by Sairica Rose and Alessandro Massazza (United for Global Mental Health), with members of the COP31 Short-Term Action Group hosted by the Global Mental Health Action Network: Ava Haine (Youth Minister for Rural and Regional Development, Fire, Disaster & Primary Industries, Australia), Ayşegül Bakır (Hacettepe University, Turkiye), Bronwyn Gresham (Psychology for a Safe Climate, Australia), Fatma Nur Dolu (Konya Food and Agriculture University, Turkiye), Harun Meral (Konya Food and Agriculture University, Turkiye), Isabelle Shaw (Global Mental Health Action Network, Australia), Litiana Lagibalavu (Climate and Health Alliance, Fiji), Selin Tanyeri (Ministry of Health, Turkiye), Sonali Varma (Australian Association for Adolescent Health, Australia), Tuna Eker (Ministry of Health, Turkiye).
