Presentation short abstract

In Catalonia, climate change is embodied through physical and mental distress or solastalgia. Emotions are central in people's everyday lived experiences of climate change. These experiences vary based on social positions, including gender, place of residence, economic situation, and age.

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is an everyday, lived experience rather than a distant threat. This article centres emotions and embodiment to examine how climate change permeates daily life in Catalonia, Spain. Climate Relief Maps used to gather, analyze, and visualize accounts of lived experience from an emotional and intersectional approach—with focus group discussions. These methods surface the emotional geographies of climate change’s impacts, delving into how bodies and everyday places are altered.

Findings reveal four main pathways through which climate change becomes embodied: (1) physical and mental distress, including heat-related strain, anxiety, and fatigue; (2) loss of sense of place as landscapes, seasons, and memories feel unsettled; (3) reconfigured social and community spaces and practices, as social life and leisure is reconfigured; and (4) dilemmas between governance and individual agency, as people question their own everyday capacity and responsibility and that of the institutions and macro-level actors.

An intersectional lens shows how these embodied experiences vary by gender, age, health, and residence, among other axes of inequalities. Emotions are not e but active forces shaping coping, adaptation, and claims on institutions. Recognising emotional and embodied impacts clarifies who bears which burdens, how attachments to place are reworked, and what forms of response feel possible or legitimate.

By foregrounding lived experience in a Global North context, the study offers a grounded account of climate realities that often remain invisible to policy. It calls for just policies that account for embodied realities and emotions as central.