RFPs: Climate and Mental Health Award for Uncovering Mechanisms Between Heat and Mental Health

Deadline: 21 January 2025

Applications are now open for the Wellcome Trust’s Climate and Mental Health Award for Uncovering Mechanisms Between Heat and Mental Health.

This award will fund projects to advance understanding of the biological, psychological and/or social mechanisms through which heat affects anxiety, depression and psychosis in the most impacted groups globally.

Successful applications will identify relevant climate-resilient and/or mental health interventions with a realistic potential for real-world application.

Topics

Research proposals should cover these topics:
- Heat:
  - extreme heat events
  - chronic exposure to unusually high temperatures
- Communities Most Impacted:
  - local or national governments
  - civil society and community-based organisations
- Mental Health Conditions in Scope:
  - all types of anxiety and depressive disorders (including obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder)
  - all forms of psychotic disorders (including schizophrenia, postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder)
- Mechanisms of Focus:
  - Applicants also need to provide evidence to justify the choice of the mechanism(s) of focus. While they recognise the exploratory nature of this area, this justification must be based either on preliminary evidence (for example, pilot data) or on indirect evidence for the relationship both between heat and the mechanism(s) under investigation as well as between mental health and the mechanism(s) of focus.
  - They encourage proposals conducting research on one mechanism at multiple levels of explanation (for example, molecular, cellular, systems, cognitive, behavioural, social, environmental or societal). Projects can also look at multiple mechanisms at the same time and at their interactions.
- Causal Insights:
  - experimental and quasi-experimental designs (for example, experimental medicine approaches or randomised controlled trials)
  - manipulation or use of experimental models (for example, iPSC-derived neurons, glia, organoids or animal models)
- Translational Opportunities:
  - considerations for improving mental health interventions (for example, psychotropic medications) in the context of heat
  - integration of mental health consideration in heat adaptation plans and the integration of heat considerations within mental health policies
- Collaboration Between Mental Health Scientists and Climate Scientists:
  - climate scientists
  - meteorologists biometeorologists
- Lived Experience Involvement:
  - expert advisors
  - coapplicants

Funding Information

Funding Amount: Up to £1 – 3 million per project.

Eligibility Criteria

You can apply to this call if you are a team of researchers:
- From any discipline relevant to mental health science and climate science
- From an eligible organisation
- Based anywhere in the world
They encourage applications from:
- Researchers at any stage of their career, including early career researchers and or those who are new to the fields of either mental health science or climate science
- Researchers from or based in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)
The Team:
- Include one lead applicant who will be accountable for the delivery of grant activities and at least one coapplicant.
- Include a lead and or coapplicants from both mental health science and meteorological climate science, including those working on human biometeorology and or climate science.
The lead Applicant:
- Have the experience and support structures in place to lead the proposed research.
- Have experience of people and research management, as appropriate for their career stage.
Coapplicant:
- Be essential for the delivery of the project and make a significant contribution, for example, in designing the proposed research or leading a specific component of the project.
- Demonstrate the team’s commitment to effectively embed lived experience expertise, as relevant to the research project.