Brain health and mental health are shaped by the environments people inhabit, and a new commission report argues that climate change, ecological degradation and urban transformation should be treated as central determinants of how brains develop, age and falter. The Earth–Brain–Health Commission, convened by Nature Mental Health in 2024, spent two years in meetings, deliberation, writing and refining before publishing its report in the November 2026 issue. Its framework unites neuroscience, psychiatry, public health and environmental science around shared challenges and solutions, moving beyond the prescription of a single research agenda toward a conceptual map for guiding future research.
The commission’s starting point is demographic. For the majority of the planet’s inhabitants who dwell in urban regions, attention to literal water and soil has been supplanted by a focus on built environments and the infrastructure associated with urbanization. China illustrates the shift vividly: the percentage of its population living in urban areas has risen from under 20% in the mid-1970s to about 68% at present. That prolific expansion has produced megacities, metropolitan areas with populations of over 10 million such as Beijing and Shanghai, whose scale creates problems of a distinct kind.
Megacities pose unique challenges because rapid population increases strain existing infrastructure, including power grids and public transportation. The innovations in architecture, commerce and technology that made urbanization and megacities possible have accelerated the consumption of natural resources and generated massive waste and pollution, with a substantial impact on the most basic elements of air, soil and water. The report characterizes this as a ‘take–make–waste’ model embedded in ever-expanding built environments, one whose effects are compounded by climate change.
Climate change intensifies extreme weather patterns and produces cycles of drought and flooding, erosion and subsidence. It also interacts with urbanization to precipitate urban heat islands, through reduced green space, more asphalt and concrete, and concentrated anthropogenic activities such as vehicle emissions and the use of air conditioning. Appreciating the enormity of these climate, environment and urbanization interactions requires, at least temporarily, zooming out to a macro scale. But understanding how such broad regional and global trends affect physical and mental health in specific populations, and even in individual people, demands a different perspective and set of tools, some of which may not yet exist.
The report proposes a fundamentally cross-disciplinary approach to the study of mental health, predicated on the dynamic interrelationships of brains, bodies, societies and physical environmental systems. By placing brain health and mental health within the broader context of environmental change, the commission broadens the framing of social determinants of mental health by integrating environmental, climate and technological determinants into a common explanatory model. In doing so, it aligns with other emerging research paradigms such as the exposome and planetary health, while preserving the unique contributions of neuroscience and psychiatry.
To make the case for this framing, the report draws on a proliferating body of work supporting linkages between changing and deteriorating environmental conditions, such as pollution, increasing temperatures and exposure to natural disasters, and adverse mental health outcomes. Equally important, if not more so, the report synthesizes where the research has gaps. The majority of studies investigating environmental exposures and mental health have been observational in nature, which precludes determining causality. Individuals and populations are not randomly adversely exposed; factors such as underlying health status, socioeconomic position, and migration or displacement can dictate where a person lives and their level of risk. Research often considers associations with specific risks, although individuals at risk seldom experience exposures in isolation, for example living in a higher population density area with greater pollution and ambient heat.
Where substantial research gains can be made, according to the commission, is in linking biological responses to environmental change with brain health and mental health. Evidence already implicates pathways involving inflammation, stress physiology, sleep disruption, cardiovascular function and direct neurotoxic effects, but the relative importance of these mechanisms probably varies across populations and exposures. The report calls for the integration of more representative and longitudinal epidemiology with other approaches, including neuroimaging, genomics and epigenomics, to establish mechanistic models that can inform prevention and intervention strategies.
The commission reframes environmental change from a stressor that merely contributes to psychiatric burden into a central determinant of brain development, cognitive aging and mental health across the lifespan. That reframing carries practical implications: urban planning, climate adaptation, housing policy and biodiversity conservation can be considered as interventions with direct effects on mental health. The report’s accompanying Policy Brief underscores that mental health and wellbeing are core aspects of resilience and consequently should be measured, aggregated and embedded in multisectoral public policy and preparedness plans, and reported alongside economic and social progress indicators.
The editorial accompanying the report acknowledges that commissions, like research agendas and roadmaps, are valuable mainly for their ability to generate measurable progress. The limitations of existing research underscore the value of the commission process: now codified, the recommendations provide a comprehensive standard for benchmarking what comes next, from fragmentation toward a cumulative science-guiding policy. For mental health research, success may look like the convergence of disciplines that have been concerned mainly with reacting to illness, into a powerful, anticipatory and adaptive effort to improve environmental and social conditions to shape healthier brains and human flourishing.
What distinguishes the Earth–Brain–Health framework is its insistence that the same physical systems altering the planet are altering minds. A traditional Chinese proverb holds that “each region’s water and soil raises its own kind of people,” a saying the editorial cites to capture how culture and development are shaped by physical environments, with newer interpretations extending to the social conditions that affect individual development, physical and mental health, and wellbeing. The commission’s contribution is to formalize that intuition into a testable research architecture, one that treats air, soil, water, heat and the built environment not as background noise but as variables with measurable biological and psychological consequences, and that names the observational and mechanistic work still needed before those consequences can be prevented at scale.
Subject of Research: How climate change, urbanization and environmental degradation shape brain development and mental health across the lifespan
Article Title: Changing brains and minds on a changing planet
Article References: Changing brains and minds on a changing planet. (2026). Nature Mental Health, 4(11), 1605–1606. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-026-00763-w (Author names are not included in the publisher’s citation export.)
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1038/s44220-026-00763-w
Keywords: brain health, mental health, climate change, urbanization, Earth–Brain–Health Commission, pollution, urban heat islands, observational studies, neuroscience, psychiatry, public health, planetary health
News Source: Glenn Wilkins. (November 4, 2026). Earth–Brain–Health Commission links climate and urban change to mental health. Scienmag.
