Google Trends: Mental health and Climate Change in the Philippines
Have extreme weather events disturbed the nation’s wellbeing?

The red line for ‘mental health’ seems to follow quite closely the blue line for ‘climate change’; the peaks for the red line seem to fit almost perfectly within those of the blue line, and the two lines sag in sync in the middle. We can infer from the graph that there is some association between mental health and climate change in the Philippines at the moment. One possibility is that climate change events lead people to search for this term, but also impact negatively on people’s mental health and lead them to seek support online.
***there have been many climate-related events recently…*** – interestingly it is during December there’s a lull. Could it be that internet-use in general goes down during events? check for other time points
Typhoon Kammuri – one of many recent extreme weather events in the Phillipines – led to floods and landslides in December 2019, which is likely to have affected web searches.
An article published by the Straits Times on 3rd December, 2019, stated that “Typhoon season used to end in October but has stretched to December since the year 2000, a phenomenon experts blamed on climate change.” This seems similar to the effects that climate change may be having on bush-fires in Australia: they have existed for a long time, but now the bush-fire season has begun to start earlier.