Emotional Responses to Climate Change in the Caribbean

Background and Purpose: The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. While everyone will likely be affected by climate change some communities and locations will be disproportionately impacted despite contributing very little to the problem. The Caribbean is particularly vulnerable to many different types of climate threats that can happen simultaneously or sequentially, including hurricanes, drought, and warming oceans. There is an emerging literature to help better understand people’s emotional responses to climate threats. The United States Virgin Islands (USVI) is particularly understudied and is the focus of this research.

Methods: This study used a Grounded Theory-informed approach. There were two arms to the study: five focus groups and 10 key informant interviews. Focus group participants were recruited from the general population over the age of 18 across the three main islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all data was collected remotely using Zoom. The principal investigator recorded and transcribed all focus group sessions and interviews. Transcripts were analyzed and coded using NVivo resulting in axial codes. Considerations for trustworthiness and rigor included audit reports, peer researcher review, and memoing, amongst others.

Results: Data analysis showed that people in the USVI do have emotional responses to the climate crisis. The study documented two key themes of feelings of loss of a past that would not occur again and anxiety about the future. These results are similar to other studies with various populations and in diverse locations around the world. The themes of loss and anxiety are similar to emerging frameworks around psychoterratic experiences including solastalgia, ecological grief, and eco anxiety. This study also suggests that certain attributes could influence an individual’s emotional responses including age, duration of exposures, gender, occupation, and recreational use of nature

Conclusions and Implications: This study provides an important contribution to the literature by ensure that people in the USVI have their experiences included. The study also adds to a growing body of literature to inform mental health practitioners about the negative emotional responses people can experience related to climate change. Additionally, this research acts as a call for social workers to advocate for policy changes so that communities like the USVI do not experience the adverse affects of climate change that they did very little to contribute towards.