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Prisk, Dan

University of British Columbia

Climate change is regarded as the most significant threat to human health in this century. There is a growing consensus that high temperatures in particular have a significant, negative effect on mental health outcomes. Work in environmental justice has shown the unequal distribution of the impacts of climate change, people who are already experiencing social marginalization tend to experience the worst effects. In this thesis, I explore climate change and health in Canada by asking if air temperature affects mental health, and testing for effect variation across three primary dimensions of social marginalization—race, gender, and income. Using a custom dataset that brings together historical weather data and survey data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, I use multivariate models to estimate the effects of absolute and relative temperature on two measures of mental health. I fail to find robust evidence for a relationship between temperature and mental health, and find none for the differential impact of temperature on mental health by race, gender, or income. These results challenge a growing body of research which shows that temperature is significantly correlated with negative mental health outcomes.

Text

2024-08-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88916

Sociology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/