How climate change may affect addiction recovery

As growing evidence shows that climate change will influence nearly every aspect of our health, a University at Buffalo School of Social Work researcher is the first to explore how climate change may affect individuals who are recovering from addiction.

Using the theory of recovery capital, Elizabeth Bowen, Ph.D., associate professor in the UB School of Social Work, outlines many ways climate change may impact addiction recovery, including how marginalization because of race, income or age could magnify these effects for particular groups. While other studies have examined the effect of climate change on substance use rates, Bowen’s work—which is available from Addiction Research & Theory through Dec. 31—is the first peer-reviewed article to look at its implications for addiction recovery.

“Though sometimes depicted as a single apocalyptic event, climate change is widespread and already affecting the health and livelihoods of many groups, including people who are in recovery,” Bowen says. “With this paper, my hope is to spur urgently needed conversation and action among researchers, social workers, service providers and people in recovery.”

Creating new and more difficult challenges

Recovery capital takes a holistic view on recovery, encompassing all the resources in a person’s life that could support or hinder their journey to wellness. The theory was developed more than 20 years ago by Robert Granfield, Ph.D., professor of sociology and vice provost for faculty affairs at UB, and William Cloud, Ph.D., a retired professor in the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work.

In her paper, Bowen cites more than 75 health, recovery and environmental studies to identify links between climate change and the four domains of recovery capital: social (the people in one’s life), physical (their job, housing and other resources), human (individual attributes like health, education and attitudes), and cultural (traditions and community-level supports).

For example, as rising temperatures and sea levels make some areas uninhabitable, people may be forced to migrate, separating them from their social networks and disrupting their access to health care and community-based services, such as recovery support groups.

Bowen describes how climate change threatens both physical and mental health—an effect that may be particularly severe for individuals in recovery who have chronic health conditions or mental health challenges. According to Bowen, about 38% of people in the U.S. with a substance use disorder also have a mental health diagnosis.

She also notes that climate change increases the likelihood of homelessness and cites a U.S. Congressional Research Services report that found climate change will decrease economic productivity and reduce earnings and employment in certain sectors.

“Recovery is significantly more difficult without safe and stable housing, adequate income, health insurance and reliable transportation,” Bowen says. “Unfortunately, people with a history of substance use problems already experience greater employment discrimination and instability than the general population, so people in recovery will be especially affected by climate-related economic challenges.”

Changing what we cannot accept

Throughout the paper, Bowen also looks at how individuals in recovery who already face systemic discrimination over their race, gender, age or other characteristics will likely feel the worst effects of climate change.

For example, according to Bowen, Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to climate-related displacement—which adds to centuries of policies forcing Native people from their land, disrupting cultural traditions and contributing to the higher rates of alcohol or drug problems we see today in some Indigenous populations.

“People with the fewest resources and the least political power stand to lose the most to climate change,” she says. “The climate crisis will only magnify the disparities that marginalized populations already face in recovery.”

Bowen hopes her work inspires researchers and practitioners alike to take action to help individuals increase their recovery capital in the face of such challenges. A new video, animated by Jon Bonebrake and produced by the UB School of Social Work, is a first step in sharing her findings and providing ideas for action steps for social workers, service providers and people in recovery.

With no other research examining climate change and recovery, Bowen says the probable effects she identified could serve as a starting point for researchers to generate and test hypotheses. To her fellow scholars, she suggests prioritizing diversity to look at how the effects differ among specific populations and partnering with people in recovery as co-researchers.

“There’s a well-known serenity prayer used in 12-step meetings that begins, ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,'” Bowen says. “By contrast, climate change is an urgent call to action to change what we quite literally cannot accept or live with, as a people and a planet.”