By Carin-Isabel Knoop and Sreedhar Potarazu
Climate change is not just an environmental crisis affecting operations, it is a mental health challenge affecting human capital. The theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day is “Access to services – mental health in catastrophes and emergencies.”
Observed annually on Oct.10, World Mental Health Day was established to focus global attention on mental health as a basic human right.
In this piece, we focus on why employers should consider what access means in a world in which climate distress and emergencies share daily lives. Organizations tend to treat climate change as a logistical or operational issue, but there is a more human cost that affects employees, leaders, and their families. Ignoring this toll undermines even robust sustainability strategies. In some ways, the infrastructure of organizations is as vulnerable as the buildings around them, weakened by years of underinvestment in human support systems.
A manager and the smoke: The everyday face of crisis
Consider the following scenario. Wildfires rage outside the city. Smoke drifts into the office. A young analyst with asthma asks whether the team should continue working in the building. A colleague dismisses the concern: “I think we will be fine and we have deadlines.” Team leader Jack must decide whether to prioritize physical safety, emotional reassurance, or productivity. His choice will set the tone not only for that meeting but for how the team experiences other crises. Jack’s dilemma raises a broader question: are individual managers unprepared or are businesses failing to equip them with the psychological consequences of disruption?
Jack is not unusual. He represents thousands of managers confronting overlapping environmental, logistical, and emotional challenges without clear guidance or resources. Few organizations train their leaders for this form of decision-making under uncertainty. Fewer still integrate mental-health access into emergency planning, which is risky in an era of constant disruption.
The climate crisis has transformed emergencies from isolated events into recurring features of daily life. Extreme weather, chronic heat, wildfires, and pollution are no longer the exception; they are part of modern existence, either directly affecting our homes, safety, and health, or being broadcast to us via our phones. When floods or tornadoes erase entire neighborhoods or small businesses, the loss is not only economic but deeply psychological — a disruption of identity, safety, and belonging. Even the tools we celebrate for their promise, such as AI, bring their own environmental cost through energy demand and water consumption.
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Each event leaves physical damage, but also invisible emotional aftershocks that reverberate through communities and workplaces alike. Some of the trauma and these aftershocks also come through the airwaves—pictures of death, destruction, and despair available for all to see, on repeat. And many who live in vulnerable regions face impossible choices: to stay for livelihood and community or to leave for safety.
The notion of access must therefore expand beyond clinical services to include the organizational and leadership structures that determine whether employees can remain physically and psychologically stable when their world is under strain. In the absence of preparation, the climate emergency can rapidly become a mental-health emergency. The two are inseparable.
The new geography of distress
Across industries and geographies, leaders increasingly face not only operational disruptions but also emotional turbulence within their teams related to climate change. Employees are frightened, angry, or resigned; some feel guilty about their perceived complicity in unsustainable systems, while others experience contempt for colleagues they see as alarmist. Political fault lines heighten the tensions.
In an earlier piece on climate distress, we noted that anxiety and contempt cane be two sides of the same coin. Both arise from fear of loss and control and attendant helplessness. For diasporic communities, cultural attitudes toward mental health and collective responsibility further shape how distress is expressed — and whether people seek help.
A Conference Board report in December 2023 suggested that more than half of respondents thought their employer was unaware of “climate anxiety” as a workplace issue. A XXOO global study in The Lancet Planetary Health reported that 80% of young adults are worried about climate change, 60% are very worried, and 40% say their mental health is routinely affected by it. This anxiety does not remain outside the office door. It enters meetings, clouds collaboration, and, if left unaddressed, undermines focus and cohesion.
The climate crisis also intensifies direct physical and psychological risks. Rising temperatures correlate with increases in hospitalizations for mental illness, domestic and other violence and death by suicide. Poor air quality affects cognitive performance and mood, and might contribute to dementia. Natural disasters obliterate homes and wealth and disrupt access to health care and medication, compounding distress. The World Health Organization estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths annually from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrheal disease, but the mental health toll is less easily quantified.
Rethinking both “access” and “services”
As Jane Goodall reminds us, however, hope is a form of energy—one that can move people to act even when outcomes are uncertain. And better information brings us hope in this space.
When the term “access” is used in mental health policy, it typically refers to proximity to clinical care, as well as affordability or availability of professionals. These remain essential, but they are insufficient. During climate-related catastrophes, access depends equally on organizational foresight. It includes the existence of protocols for psychological first aid, the availability of remote or flexible work during extreme weather, and the assurance that employees will not be penalized for prioritizing their safety.
Leaders should consider five dimensions of access:
- Physical access – safe workplaces, access to water and shade, clean air, and the infrastructure to support health in changing conditions.
- Informational access – transparent communication during crises to reduce rumor, fear, and misinformation, and also uneven treatment across teams and facilities.
- Psychological access – policies that normalize distress and encourage early use of mental-health resources.
- Managerial access – training supervisors to recognize signs of strain and direct employees to support.
- Equitable access – ensuring that part-time, contract, and frontline workers receive the same protections as corporate staff.
Each dimension requires foresight and investment. It is easier to budget for remote-work technology than for the invisible costs of trauma, yet the latter can be more damaging to long-term productivity and morale.
Elizabeth Power, founder of the Trauma Informed Academy, explains: “People used to say ‘Dig your well before you get thirsty.’ What this means for leaders and HR is that they need to play a role in prevention as well as initial response. Fewer than 25% develop PTSD after a powerful overwhelming event—the rest of may have a little PTS, stress, anxiety or temporary hyper vigilance. We need more emphasis on what we call Trauma Responsive Emotional Intelligence (TREQ) before things happen.” Yet, ironically, many public and corporate budgets are shrinking for the very programs that could build resilience—putting even greater focus on workplace readiness.
Avoiding maladaptation
Good intentions can produce harm if poorly implemented. In our research we have seen examples of maladaptation: companies installing air conditioners to mitigate heat without addressing the energy impact; launching superficial “green” initiatives that increase cynicism; appointing sustainability officers but failing to resource them. Such gestures may provide temporary reassurance while worsening long-term risk. Effective adaptation demands coherence between environmental action and human support.
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From crisis response to readiness
Organizations traditionally approach mental health reactively: counseling after a disaster, leavers or wellness days after burnout. Climate change demands a shift from crisis response to readiness. The analogy to disaster preparedness is deliberate. Just as fire drills train people to evacuate safely, psychological preparedness should train teams to recognize fear as a signal, not a stigma, and giving them and their bosses resources and language to tackle crises together.
Access also depends on relationships beyond the organization. Businesses that collaborate with community mental-health providers, emergency services, and public-health agencies will recover faster when crises occur. Leaders who map vulnerabilities in advance—supply-chain dependencies, regional climate risks, and employee exposure—can design interventions that protect both their people and their operations.
Why mental health is a leadership responsibility
Mental health access during emergencies cannot be outsourced to government or to health insurers alone. It begins with leadership that sees emotional resilience as integral to organizational resilience. During disasters, employees turn first to their immediate supervisors for guidance, not to national hotlines. The ability of a manager to communicate calmly, provide options, and model steadiness can determine whether a team functions or fractures—and the extent to which it can continue to get its work done.
Leadership in the climate era will increasingly be measured by an organization’s capacity to sustain psychological stability while navigating uncertainty. It will require leaders to balance empathy with discipline, hope with realism, and individual care with collective goals. Access, in this sense, is not merely about ensuring services but about cultivating trust so that employees feel able to use them.
From access to action
World Mental Health Day invites reflection but also responsibility. As catastrophes become chronic, the distinction between emergency and routine blurs. Building access to mental health services in this environment means designing systems that work under pressure: benefits that activate automatically during crises, partnerships that deliver telehealth across regions, and cultures that treat emotional well-being as infrastructure. Examples include training managers in psychological first aid, expanding telehealth coverage, and investing in cross-sector networks that ensure support reaches those in need.
The next climate event—whether a flood, a fire, or a heatwave—will test every organization’s preparedness. The climate crisis has revealed how intertwined the physical and psychological worlds have become and how rethinking access matters. Leaders cannot cool the planet overnight, but they can ensure that when the temperature rises and disaster strikes, no one faces it alone. The question is not whether we can prevent the crisis, but whether we can prevent it from becoming a crisis of care. When leaders integrate mental health access into their definition of climate resilience, they protect not only their people but the continuity of enterprise itself.
(Sreedhar Potarazu, MD, MBA, is an ophthalmologist, healthcare entrepreneur and author with more than two decades of experience at the intersection of medicine, business, and technology.
Carin Isabel Knoop is a management researcher who leads the Case Research & Writing Group at Harvard Business School. She is the co-author of “Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace” (Springer).