The emotional toll of fieldwork

Abstract

The Comment by Schipper et al.¹ offers a crucial perspective on the emotional strain climate scientists face as they confront the accelerating climate crisis. It highlights how climate scientists experience feelings of despair, anxiety, sadness and worry, yet hesitate to communicate these emotions due to the prevailing norm that rigorous science should be objective, value-free and apolitical — essentially unemotional. This problematic dichotomy between emotion and science, particularly in the natural sciences, resonates deeply with our experiences as qualitative human geographers working on climate adaptation and climate justice.

While Schipper et al. focus on the emotional burdens in climate science more broadly, we believe that one aspect warrants further attention: the profound emotional challenges that may arise specifically during and after ethnographic fieldwork. Unlike laboratory or desk-based work, ethnographic fieldwork — especially in regions disproportionately affected by climate change — often places researchers in direct contact with the environments and communities where the immediacy of climate impacts and human vulnerability is most acute and palpable. It may be one thing to model the rise of global temperatures or project the consequences of climate change in a controlled and stable environment; it is another to confront the tangible impacts of these changes in person on the ground. The embodied detachment provided by engaging with quantitative models and computer simulations that are abstracted and distant from the everyday human experience of climate change, as well as from individuals’ hopes, dreams and identities, may create psychological buffers that field scientists might lack. Fieldwork, by its nature, is a deeply embodied experience².