We live in a time of loss. Wild places dwindle, the animals and plants that live in them disappear. Climate change is now a certainty, and it will without a doubt lead to the loss of land, species, and ways of life. In the abstract this is disconcerting. Up close it is devastating. I worked on the BBC’s Climate Change: The Facts, presented by David Attenborough, and have felt this pain first-hand.

Climate Change: The Facts review – our greatest threat, laid bare Read more

Last year, I was living a charmed life. I graduated from university and jetted off (painfully ironic, I know) to lead an expedition on a remote South Pacific island, where I studied one of the world’s rarest parrots and the role of culture in conservation. Within a few days of my return I somehow stepped into a job at the BBC on a documentary about climate change, initially called Two Degrees (the name changed when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report released last October informed us that 1.5C would be more appropriate, and that isn’t really very catchy). I was to be the show’s researcher, tasked with finding stories that would best educate and entertain the British public.

What followed were four months of desperately tracking down and interviewing the people who live on the frontline of climate change. I spoke to scientists who described the so-loud-it-gives-you-whiplash crack of a glacier calving off the Greenland ice shelf. Another told me of the horror he felt when his calculations revealed that the current logging and burning of tropical forests releases more carbon dioxide than our remaining forests could possibly absorb. I read detailed and disturbing death threats sent to climate activists to make them go quiet.

My nights became ones of sleeplessness with a racing heart. I have been hit by a panic attack in the supermarket

I listened to people who have lost their homes and heritage to rising sea levels. I watched countless videos of wildfires ripping through suburbia, and cannot forget the little girl’s voice in the background of one shaky mobile phone recording asking her daddy if she was going to catch fire. Still, the most upsetting videos I saw were of politicians and pundits spreading harmful lies, promoting their own interests at the cost of protecting children from climate change.

It was a privilege to hear these stories, but I struggled to cope with what I learned. Climate anxiety, as I think of it, crept into my mind and body, and settled as an incoherent anger. My nights became ones of sleeplessness with a tight racing heart. I have been hit by a panic attack in the snack aisle of a supermarket, overwhelmed by the countless choices and their consequences. Hot sunny days in April scare me. I cannot stop thinking about climate change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When people hear the human stories behind climate change we can build that tenuous and critical emotional connection.’ A cutout of David Attenborough is held up by climate protesters in London. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

I have always been a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, and it has been frightening to be feeling physically sick with nervousness for the first time in my life. I am far from the first person to have felt this way, and there is a rapidly growing body of literature on the psychological impact of climate change. In 2009, an article in the public health journal the Lancet stated that “climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”, and then last year a report listed the ways in which climate change affects mental health: the rise of extreme temperatures exacerbates anxiety and depression, the spread of vector-borne diseases will cause a cascade of cognitive and neurological issues, and freakish weather events will trigger post-traumatic stress disorder.

Communities that depend on the land struggle to contend with shifting landscapes caused by unpredictable weather patterns, rising sea levels and erosion. Indigenous groups and farmers feel dismay that they no longer “know” their landscape and seasons, something their predecessors relied on to survive. When traditional ecological knowledge becomes useless, it is forgotten. With this loss of culture comes the loss of identity, and traditionally marginalised people may once more suffer a loss of way of life.

The truth about anxiety – without it we wouldn’t have hope Read more

As a city dweller in the UK, I am fortunate not to have been physically touched by climate change, and yet it has consumed my thoughts. While this has been unpleasant, it is actually a positive discovery. For years the dogma has been that climate change is too abstract a concept for people to truly care about it, yet my experience, and that of so many others, demonstrates that when people hear the human stories we can build that tenuous and critical emotional connection with such an amorphous subject.

Aldo Leopold, the great American ecologist, wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”; and as beautiful as that may be, I hope that if we open these wounds to others we may be able to transform our pain into strength.

• Liv Grant is a conservationist and documentary film-maker. She is a Scientific Exploration Society explorer and is working on a documentary about the Marquesas Islands.