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Paper short abstract

Climate change in Ghana’s Volta Delta worsens children’s mental health through flooding and displacement. While adaptation focuses on infrastructure, psychosocial wellbeing is neglected, exposing inequities in climate–health planning and the need for child-centered responses.

Paper long abstract

Climate change is reshaping global health futures in ways that reflect and reproduce existing inequalities, particularly in the Global South. This paper examines children’s mental health in Ghana’s Volta Delta, a coastal region experiencing recurrent flooding, erosion, and displacement, to show how dominant climate and development responses marginalize psychosocial wellbeing. It argues that while climate adaptation efforts prioritize physical infrastructure and emergency relief, children’s mental health remains largely invisible within climate–health planning.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines the Child PTSD Symptom Scale for DSM-V (CPSS-V SR), the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale–Youth version (DASS-Y), and semi-structured interviews with children affected by repeated climate-related displacement. Findings reveal high levels of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder linked to disrupted schooling, loss of social networks, and prolonged uncertainty about the future. These outcomes illustrate how climate change functions as a threat multiplier, intensifying mental health risks within already fragile health and social protection systems.

The findings demonstrate that children’s mental health is not simply an individual health concern but a development issue shaped by unequal exposure to climate risks and limited access to psychosocial support. The continued neglect of children’s mental health within climate adaptation and development planning constitutes a form of exclusion, raising ethical questions about whose health is prioritized under conditions of climate stress. Centering children’s lived experiences is therefore essential to designing more equitable, inclusive, and responsive climate–health policies and interventions.