Heat Resilience and Mental Health: Engineering Pathways to Reduce Depression and Anxiety in Schools in Nepal and Sri Lanka

Schools are critical environments for adolescent development, providing unique contexts to investigate how extreme heat impacts depression and anxiety among students. This project would implement sustainable, culturally and contextually tailored engineering interventions (e.g., enhanced natural ventilation, shading, greening) for heat reduction in secondary schools in Sri Lanka and Nepal, offering an opportunity to develop a causal framework to understand how mitigating heat exposure influences depression and anxiety. We hypothesise mitigating heat exposure reduces depression and anxiety via improved emotional regulation (e.g., reduced irritability and aggression), cognition (e.g., enhanced attention and memory), and social engagement (e.g., increased peer interaction and reduced isolation). We will closely monitor physical environmental changes—e.g., reduced indoor temperature, humidity and improved air quality to understand how they drive proposed mechanisms. We will conduct qualitative interviews and body mapping workshops with youth in Nepal and Sri Lanka to refine hypothesised mechanisms and associated assessments. A pilot cluster-randomised trial in eight schools in Sri Lanka and Nepal will implement the engineering interventions and focus on feasibility, acceptability, appropriateness and assessment of proposed mechanisms. We will generate preliminary insights into mechanisms linking extreme heat to depression and anxiety and provide a framework to enhance resilience of school environments to heat.