Emotional geographies of climate change and disasters

This chapter reviews research on the emotional dimensions of climate change and disasters. Following some initial reflections on the disciplinarity of this scholarship and a taxonomy of climate emotions, we examine three areas of scholarship on climate emotions: grief, loss and mourning; anxiety, worry and fear; and the link between climate emotions and climate action. We then consider the disaster emotions literature, discussing work on displacement and disrupted place attachments, grief and loss, the gendered and unevenly distributed nature of disaster emotions, temporality, and mediatisation. Unsurprisingly, there are some commonalities with respect to the emotions people experience in relation to both climate change and disasters. As well as grief, loss, anxiety and fear, there is an increasing trend towards hopefulness, which provides support for grounded actions for the common good.