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The current pandemic and ongoing climate risks highlight the limited capacity of various systems, including health and social ones, to respond to population-scale and long-term threats. Practices to reduce the impacts on the health and well-being of populations must evolve from a reactive mode to preventive, proactive and concerted actions beginning at individual and community levels. Experiences and lessons learned from the pandemic will help to better prevent and reduce the psychosocial impacts of floods, or other hydroclimatic risks, in a climate change context.

The present paper first describes the complexity and the challenges associated with climate change and systemic risks. It also presents some systemic frameworks of mental health determinants, and provides an overview of the different types of psychosocial impacts of disasters. Through various Quebec case studies and using lessons learned from past and recent flood-related events, recommendations are made on how to better integrate individual and community factors in disaster response.

Results highlight the fact that people who have been affected by the events are significantly more likely to have mental health problems than those not exposed to flooding. They further demonstrate the adverse and long-term effects of floods on psychological health, notably stemming from indirect stressors at the community and institutional levels. Different strategies are proposed from individual-centered to systemic approaches, in putting forward the advantages from intersectoral and multirisk researches and interventions.

The establishment of an intersectoral flood network, namely the InterSectoral Flood Network of Québec (RIISQ), is presented as an interesting avenue to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and a systemic view of flood risks. Intersectoral work is proving to be a major issue in the management of systemic risks, and should concern communities, health and mental health professionals, and the various levels of governance. As climate change is called upon to lead to more and more systemic risks, close collaboration between all the areas concerned with the management of the factors of vulnerability and exposure of populations will be necessary to respond effectively to damages and impacts (direct and indirect) linked to new meteorological and compound hazards. This means as well to better integrate the communication managers into the risk management team.

This paper aims to address a gap in investigating specific impacts of climate change on mental health in the Pacific region, a region prone to extreme events. This paper reports on a study on the connections between climate change, public health, extreme weather and climate events (EWEs), livelihoods and mental health, focusing on the Pacific region Islands countries.

This paper deploys two main methods. The first is a bibliometric analysis to understand the state of the literature. For example, the input data for term co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer is bibliometric data of publications downloaded from Scopus. The second method describes case studies, which outline some of the EWEs the region has faced, which have also impacted mental health.

The results suggest that the increased frequency of EWEs in the region contributes to a greater incidence of mental health problems. These, in turn, are associated with a relatively low level of resilience and greater vulnerability. The findings illustrate the need for improvements in the public health systems of Pacific nations so that they are in a better position to cope with the pressures posed by a changing environment.

This paper contributes to the current literature by identifying the links between climate change, extreme events, environmental health and mental health consequences in the Pacific Region. It calls for greater awareness of the subject matter of mental health among public health professionals so that they may be better able to recognise the symptoms and relate them to their climate-related causes and co-determinant factors.