As the planet warms, what is climate change doing to our brains? Burcin Ikiz, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist who leads the Neuro Climate Working Group, an interdisciplinary research network. It recently released a report about how climate and environmental changes impact brain health – from cognitive function to mental health. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple talked with her about the findings.
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Kara Holsopple: What are the main climate-related environmental exposures that impact brain health?
Burcin Ikiz: It’s a whole range of them. We have found, and we’re still learning about other factors, the main ones are extreme heat, air pollution, extreme weather events — these include wildfires, hurricanes, storms, and water and food insecurity that usually comes from long times of drought and floods — as well as water and soil contamination, and those usually happen due to the floods and wildfires with the chemicals that come from these disasters, and finally vector-borne diseases, the ones that are transmitted by mosquitoes or even ticks.
Kara Holsopple: Let’s look more closely at air pollution because we’ve been talking about methane pollution over the last couple of weeks on our show, both from abandoned oil and gas wells in our region and also the Trump administration’s plan to loosen methane regulations for the oil and gas industry. What are the particular brain health issues associated with air pollution?
Burcin Ikiz: For the majority of environmental health studies that have looked at the human health impacts of air pollution, the conversation has been a lot on our lungs, on our respiratory systems, and on our cardiovascular systems.
But more and more evidence, actually we have some really great colleagues in our Neuro Climate Working Group that have been studying, for example, the implications of prenatal exposures to air pollution on children’s brain development. We’re finding that air pollution, PM 2.5, there’s all sorts of chemicals that come as part of air pollution, they can have really drastic impacts on our brains, impacting the neurodevelopment of fetuses or babies and children.
It harms the mental health of individuals, young adults, especially, as well as our executive functioning, cognition, and increases risk for stroke and dementia.
We contributed to the World Health Organization’s dementia prevention guidelines. The second version just came out a couple of months ago, putting air pollution as the first environmental, modifiable risk factor that we need to do something about because in one report that we were part of last year, more than one-fourth of dementia deaths in 2023 were attributable to air pollution.
Kara Holsopple: Twenty-five percent of dementia deaths in 2023 were attributable to air pollution?
Burcin Ikiz: This is just probably a smaller portion of what we may be seeing in the effects of the neurological impacts, effects on brain aging of individuals that are exposed to air pollution, yes.
Kara Holsopple: Included in the report are first-hand accounts of how people are experiencing some of these climate-related environmental exposures. Can you give me an example or tell me a little bit about that portion of the report?
Burcin Ikiz: That part was actually really meaningful for us, for me as a scientist as well, because we usually are kind of ostriches, digging deep into the earth, looking for facts and evidence and science. And we really wanted to, in our report, bring in the human stories and related lived experiences from around the world.
We have an example of a psychiatrist colleague from Mauritania. This is a very small country in West Africa where they experience extreme heat beyond 110 degrees F for months at a time, and what it does to the mental health of individuals. We have an account of a doctor in Kenya seeing after a flood a child’s mental health being impacted and his grandmother carrying him to the hospital and what it meant to the whole family having to care for this child.
In Türkiye, where I’m from, the farming communities there, what it means having these long periods of drought to the mental health of people whose livelihood depends on farming, and how it has changed their whole culture and family values throughout this span of time. They see this generational livelihood and values being changed over the picture of the climate changing as well.
Kara Holsopple: Was there anything that surprised you about the findings in the report?
Burcin Ikiz: What was surprising to me was how long-term these impacts can be on the individuals and the families, and just the size of the impact from social to economic. When we talk about the brain health of an individual, healthy brains are the essence of a healthy society, and so the implications are not just a mortality cost or some kind of thing that you can put in an economic report.
Brain health is the blind spot of the climate policy. There is nothing around protecting our brains when we talk about environmental regulations.
This affects creativity, productivity, and people’s well-being in such a foundational way. So really realizing how important brain health to an existing society is, and also finding out through our report that there’s almost never a mention of our brains in any of the environmental policies, climate policies.
We did a separate perspective piece afterward saying exactly that: brain health is the blind spot of the climate policy. There is nothing around protecting our brains when we talk about environmental regulations.
Kara Holsopple: This might seem like a dumb question, but what do you mean when you say a healthy brain?
Burcin Ikiz: It’s actually a great question. When we say brain health, first of all, even that concept has differed compared to our neurologist colleagues, our psychiatrist colleagues, or our mental health practitioners.
We consider brain health anything that pertains to the brain that is functioning well. It involves children’s neurodevelopment; it involves cognition, executive function, any of the brain functions working well.
We’re talking about mental health and neurological health. So it’s not just the lack of disease, but it’s a well-functioning brain that can make decisions correctly, and that is functioning properly, developing properly and aging properly without any disease.
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Kara Holsopple: How do you propose making brain health a priority in climate science and in policy?
Burcin Ikiz: Fifty of our global experts worked on this report for over two years to be able to bring it to where it is. Once we were able to make the invisible visible and show how much our brains are impacted and what the evidence shows, the second question we had was, okay, what do we do with this evidence? How do we translate it into action around policy, into informing regulations and so on?
We really feel like, first of all, make brain health outcomes a measurement for when we look at the environmental health impacts of anything. This could be carbon emissions; this could be clean air regulation.
For example, one of our members had a great study that came out a couple of months ago – so it doesn’t always have to be a sad story. It could be a very positive story, showing that the clean air regulations that were put in place in New York City around the 1990s to 2000s actually significantly improved the cognition scores of children. We see similar results coming from lowering dementia rates or even lowering suicide rates in China, for example, when the very strict clean air regulations came in 2015.
If we could make these kinds of outcomes more visible and put perhaps a cost to it, this is the cost of inaction. If you don’t do anything about carbon emissions, if you don’t do anything about the air pollution, we are talking about just many more people living with dementia and being able to really take this to those policy spaces with these numbers, these outcomes.
We hope that then people will be looking at the problems from a very different angle and realizing, “Oh, this is going to be a huge cost to my community. This is going to be a big burden, and we have to do something about it.”
Burcin Ikiz is a neuroscientist who leads the Neuro Climate Working Group.
