Mapping Eco-Affective Health: A Spatial Framework for Climate-Related Emotional Responses and Mental Health in Urban...

Urban environments concentrate spatially distributed stressors, including heat, noise, pollution, and biodiversity loss, that are increasingly recognized as determinants of population mental health. However, current approaches rarely integrate environmental structure, lived exposure, and climate-related emotional responses within a unified spatial framework applicable to public health. This article introduces Eco-Affective Health Mapping (EAHM) as a conceptual, spatially explicit framework, grounded in the recently formalized Eco-Affective Health theoretical model, for understanding how environmental conditions may shape climate-related emotional responses, including eco-anxiety, solastalgia, and ecological grief, across urban socio-ecological systems. Drawing on evidence from spatial epidemiology, landscape ecology, environmental mental health, and digital phenotyping, I argue that affective responses to environmental stressors are not randomly distributed but are hypothesized to exhibit spatial clustering in relation to environmental exposures, landscape configuration, and mobility-based interactions. I propose the Eco-Affective Health Mapping (EAHM) framework, which integrates four spatial layers: environmental exposures, landscape configuration, person-place interaction, and affective indicators, together with a companion composite metric, the Eco-Affective Load Index (EALI), for which I provide a formal multi-domain specification and a purely illustrative, non-empirical worked example. EAHM is presented here as a theoretical and methodological proposal rather than as a validated instrument: no primary environmental, mobility, or affective data were collected or analyzed for this article, and the framework's constituent relationships require prospective empirical testing, for which I outline a companion measurement strategy grounded in the Eco-Affective Health Assessment Protocol (EAHAP). By conceptualizing climate-related emotional responses as candidate measurable public health signals, EAHM is intended to support a future shift toward prevention-oriented, population-level mental health strategies aligned with planetary health and sustainable development agendas.