Toward human-centred resilience quantification: The role of eco-affective state variables

Resilience has become one of the most influential ideas in how societies plan for climate change and environmental risk, guiding decisions in disaster preparedness, urban planning, and sustainability policy. Yet most tools used to measure resilience focus on physical infrastructure, institutional capacity, and socio-economic indicators, and pay comparatively little attention to how people actually experience environmental change as it unfolds. This gap matters, because how communities feel about a changing environment, whether they feel distressed, disconnected, or motivated to act, shapes whether adaptation efforts can be sustained over time. This Essay argues that resilience quantification is incomplete without accounting for these lived, emotional responses, here termed eco-affective state variables: patterned, population-level affective responses that emerge from sustained human-environment interactions. I focus in particular on two such states, solastalgia (distress caused by unwelcome change to one's home environment) and soliphilia (an affective orientation of care and commitment toward one's environment), because together they capture both the psychological cost of environmental change and the affective resource that allows people to keep engaging with it. I propose that these states can be tracked as complementary indicators, moderating factors, and early-warning signals within existing resilience frameworks, without replacing conventional metrics or treating environmental distress as a clinical problem. Incorporating eco-affective states into resilience metrics can help identify communities under strain before this strain becomes visible in conventional indicators, with direct implications for urban planning, climate adaptation, and environmental public health.