Climate Brain

Climate Change on the Brain

High-Level Project Summary

Climate change is rapidly occurring. Mental health conditions are increasing. Suicide rates increase in the summer. These are all reasons to examine the relationship between climate change and mental health conditions. Research has shown that there is a correlation with climate and geography with regard to mental health. For our project, we wanted to begin to explore how climate change may impact mental health by looking into something measurable like suicide rates. To do this, we analyzed the relationship among specific climate/geographical variables like temperature, year, carbon dioxide, and suicide rate. Results show carbon dioxide and temperature to be related to suicide rates.

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/lbrendle/climatebrain

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DrsDshW5ugIx-d6VNLjqpDRVh5FLz0PAJn2C6WN46Jc/edit?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

1. Background: Climate change is rapidly occurring. Mental health conditions are increasing. Suicide rates increase in the summer. These are all reasons to examine the relationship between climate change and mental health conditions such as suicide rates. Research has shown that there is a correlation with climate and geography with regard to mental health. For our project, we wanted to begin to explore how climate change may impact mental health by looking into something measurable like suicide rates. To do this, we analyzed the relationship among specific climate/geographical variables like temperature, year, carbon dioxide, and suicide rate. Results show carbon dioxide and temperature to be related to suicide rates. If given more in-depth data for suicide rates, perhaps we can examine further the effect climate change has (indrectly) on mental health and suicide.

2. What We Did: First, we looked into research studies regarding mental health and climate change. Studies show that climate change impacts mental health both directly and indirectly. For example, people may be anxious about climate change (directly) and may have a predisposition to mental health conditions because of climate change (indirectly). Our theory is that different variables related to climate change like temperature, sea level, ocean temperature, wind, carbon dioxide, and temperature affect mental health - specifically suicide rates. We used two NASA data sets from climate.nasa.gov - Global Temperature and Global Carbon Dioxide, one WHO data set - Global Suicide Rate, and one CDC data set - Provisional Suicide Rate. However, we had difficulty finding data sets that matched in terms of time period (eg. weekly, monthly, annually). For the first study, we merged three global datasets measured annually: temperature, carbon dioxide, and suicide rates. We used the combined data set (climate.csv) to run a regression analysis to find predictors of suicide rate. Finally, we ran a regression analysis constrained to Global Carbon Dioxide data and United States Suicide data using a merged dataset (cliamte3.csv) by month to examine season relationships.

3. Inspiration: Research shows that suicide rates increase in the summer, which is interesting. Our first theory was that temperature may correlate with suicide rates. Thus, climate change could seemingly have an impact on suicide rates and other mental health conditions.

4. Results: The results from the first regression model show an inverse relationship between year + temperature and suicide rate. Additionally, results show a relationship between carbon dioxide and suicide rate. For example, as temperature goes down so does suicide rate, which shows an increase in tempearture increases suicide rates. As carbon dioxide increases, so does suicide rate. The r-squared value and coefficient p-values show the model to be significant.

4. Impact of Results: The results show carbon dioxide and temperature to be related to suicide rate. If further researched, perhaps we can pinpoint areas of interest to decrease mental health conditions and suicide rates. It is my belief that chemicals play a role in the aforementioned conditions. Though mental health conditions and suicides do not necesarily have explicit or singular causes, knowledge of chemical reactions between the brain and climate could expand current treatments and suicide prevention efforts.

6. Future Work: The dataset shows carbon dioxide to be related to suicide rate, which is an interesting finding. Future directions for research would be into the chemical impact of climate change and its effect on mental health conditions such as suicide. It’s possible that there is a biochemical reaction to various chemicals on earth including but not limited to carbon dioxide. Additionally, future research should include variables such as measures of social change to examine other possible factors. Despite our interesting findings, our data analysis faced limitations and challenges. We were limited to annual data, which resulted in a small dataset. Future analyses should include daily, weekly, and monthly measures of variables such as temperature, carbon dioxide, year, UV, and other chemicals prominent in climate change. Furthermore, we found carbon dioxide rates to go up during the summer despite vegetation. However, as temperatures increase, so does ocean temperature, which releases carbon dioxide. Due to drought, vegetation may be impacted, which could explain by vegetation is not absorbing carbon dioxide at a high enough rate or unable to keep up with the rate of carbon dioxide being released into the environment.

7. Tools Used: We performed a literature search and review for preliminary research into the topic. Next, we scraped data from climate.nasa.gov and the World Health Organization. We downloaded csv files of the datasets. Then we used python to load the datasets and explore using packages such as pandas to plot and create dataframes and statsmodels to apply regression analysis.

Space Agency Data

We used space agency data found on climate.nasa.gov.

Hackathon Journey

The Space Apps experience was an opportunity to dive deeper into the impact climate change has on mental health. We approached the project by doing preliminary research into literature and collecting data from NASA and WHO.