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Abstract
Climate change has caused a significant increase in global temperature and local air pollution continues to be a public health risk, especially in rapidly industrializing countries. While scientific consensus has been reached about the seriousness of the risks posed by heat and air pollution on human physical health outcomes, their impacts on mental health remain understudied. Mental health has been gaining attention among world leaders in recent years and the promotion of mental health hasfor the first timebeen included in the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda under goal number 3 (Good Health and Well-being) to be reached by 2030 (United Nations, 2017). Studies from psychology and neuroscience predict changes in sleep quality and brain functions under heat and air pollution that could potentially affect mental well-being, personality, and aggressive behaviors. Very few empirical studies, however, have examined these linkages. My research fills this gap by inspecting the mental-health consequences of these two key environmental factors: heat and local air pollution. Chapter 2 investigates the impact of increasing temperatures on the mental health of the U.S. adult population, monetize the cost of higher temperatures on mental health using microeconomic theory, and predict the associated economic cost from loss of mental health in the US by the end of the 21st century under nine climate change models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) high CO2 emission scenarios. Chapter 3 provides an empirical study that identifies the potential impact of air pollution on adolescents noncognitive performance in China, given the neuroscience literature that documents the damage of air pollution on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain that controls reflective performance of emotions and personality. Chapter 4 examines both the outward aggressive behavior as characterized by crime and the inward aggressive behavior as characterized by suicide in the U.S. using a spatial-panel approach that considers not only the repetitiveness over time but also the spatial heterogeneity such that an emphasis on hotspots are allowed to be placed on local suicide and crime policies under climate change.