Why Uganda needs international recognition of climate anxiety
The psychological cost of a changing climate is already being felt in Uganda, but international law has yet to fully recognise it, writes Mushkan Singadia
Mushkan Singadia. (Courtesy)
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OPINION
By Mushkan Singadia
Growing up in eastern Uganda, I attended MMS School in Kakira, Jinja, a township that shaped who I am. But it was the hills of eastern Uganda, not any classroom, that taught me my most important lesson.
Every morning, I walked to school past those hills. Every evening I watched them from our porch. I grew up with rabbits too, shy creatures which always knew before I did when something was wrong.
They would grow restless, anxious, sensing a change in their environment before it arrived. I did not understand it then. I understand it now. Those rabbits were grieving something that had not yet been lost.
When I return home today, the hills of eastern Uganda are different. Paler. Quieter. The green is retreating — slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way a person ages when you are not watching. And that strange restlessness I saw in my rabbits I feel it too. A knot in the stomach. A grief with no funeral.
A loss that has not yet fully arrived, but is already being mourned. That feeling has a name now: anticipatory climate anxiety. Anticipatory climate anxiety is not general worry about climate change.
It is experienced by farmers watching rainfall patterns shift, communities watching water sources diminish, and children growing up in landscapes their parents would not recognise.
It is real, documentable and present. And international law cannot see it. This matters enormously for Uganda.
As a country that has contributed minimally to the global emissions driving climate change, Uganda bears a disproportionate psychological burden alongside its physical one.
The communities experiencing anticipatory climate anxiety most acutely are precisely those who contributed least to causing it. That is not merely a moral injustice, it is a legal one.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change acknowledges non-economic loss and damage, cultural loss, loss of biodiversity, psychological harm, in principle. But in practice there is no mechanism to define it, assess it, or remedy it.
The Loss and Damage Fund, established at COP27 and operationalised at COP28, was a historic breakthrough. But it was built to respond to losses that have already happened, floods, droughts, displaced communities.
It has no framework for the harm that exists now, in the minds and hearts of people who can see what is coming before it fully arrives. “The harm exists. The framework simply has no door for it to enter through.” This invisibility is not accidental.
It is a structural feature of how international climate law was built — for a legal subject who suffers physical, measurable, attributable loss, not psychological, anticipatory, diffuse harm.
The landmark KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in 2024 confirmed that diffuse, forward-looking climate harm can ground a human rights claim.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child general comment 26 of 2023 acknowledged that children experience anticipatory psychological distress from climate change.
The International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 2024 affirmed that states have known for decades that their emissions would destroy the ecological systems communities depend on.
The legal architecture is moving — but it has not yet arrived at anticipatory climate anxiety as a distinct cognisable category.
Uganda has long been at the forefront of climate vulnerability and climate advocacy, pushing for loss and damage recognition long before it became mainstream international discourse. The next frontier is psychological harm. The next frontier is anticipatory climate anxiety.
And Uganda, whose communities live this reality every day, should be leading that conversation. The hills of eastern Uganda are still fading. International law has not yet learnt to see that as a harm it must address. It must.
The writer is a global environment and climate change law student and environmental engineer at the University of Edinburgh, and president of the Edinburgh Law School