Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Climate change in Ghana’s Volta Delta worsens children’s mental health via flooding and displacement. While adaptation focuses on infrastructure, psychosocial wellbeing is neglected. Community coping exists, but exclusion highlights inequities in climate–health planning.

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 paper also highlights community-based coping strategies, including kinship support, collective caregiving, and culturally embedded practices that sustain children’s wellbeing in contexts of limited institutional support. While these responses demonstrate local agency, they also expose the unequal distribution of responsibility for climate-health adaptation. The paper argues that the continued neglect of children’s mental health in climate responses constitutes a form of exclusion, raising ethical questions about whose health is prioritized in development under climate stress. Centering children's lived experiences is therefore essential to building more just and inclusive climate–health futures.