Understanding
Climate Emotions
The Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance
About this course
Understanding Climate Emotions is a free, two-hour professional development course that introduces the spectrum of emotional responses to climate change, examines the social, developmental, and intersectional factors that shape them, and offers practical strategies for building resilience and supporting others.
It is designed for professionals across sectors — educators, health and social care providers, journalists, faith and community leaders, and policymakers — and for anyone who wants to engage more thoughtfully with the emotional dimensions of the climate crisis.
Each module pairs a narrated walkthrough with reflective prompts, readings, and a knowledge check. Complete all six to earn a certificate.
Planetary Health
Human wellbeing is inseparable from environmental health. Of nine planetary boundaries, seven are now crossed.
Stockholm Resilience Centre · Planetary boundaries assessments, 2009–2025
Transcript — slide 1
Reflect, read, and check your understanding
The walkthrough above is the same content you can engage with at your own pace below — explore the reflections, read the full text, flip the cards, and complete the knowledge check.
Learning Objectives
- Define climate change and identify its key impacts on individuals, communities, and ecosystems.
- Recognize that climate change is both an environmental and a relational crisis, including from Indigenous perspectives.
Opening Reflection
Before we begin, take a moment to notice where you are right now. What drew you to this course? When you think about climate change, what feelings come up — even subtly? There are no right answers; this is just a starting point for the work ahead.
Your response is private and saved locally — submitting unlocks the rest of the module's progression.
Important Note
Engaging with topics related to mental health, climate change, and injustice can be distressing and take an emotional toll. Please pace yourself, take breaks as needed, and practice self-care. You do not need to complete this course in one sitting — your progress will be saved.
What Are Climate Emotions?
Climate emotions are the full spectrum of emotional responses people have to climate change. They include worry and anxiety, anticipatory stress, grief and solastalgia, guilt and shame, anger and rage, isolation and alienation, denial and disengagement, ecoparalysis and fatalism, and hope and resilience. Most people carry several of these at once, and the mix shifts over time depending on what is happening in the world, in their community, and in their own life.
Climate emotions are not pathological. They are natural, meaningful signals — the kinds of feelings any caring person might have when facing real threats to the places, species, communities, and futures they love. The aim of this course is not to eliminate them, but to help you recognize, name, and work with them in ways that sustain your wellbeing and your engagement.
What This Course Covers
Over the next two-plus hours, you'll work through six modules:
- Welcome and Foundations — climate change as both environmental and relational crisis (this module).
- The Landscape of Climate Emotions — nine overlapping categories of climate emotions, one by one.
- What Shapes Our Climate Emotions — life stage, exposure, marginalization, and intersecting identities.
- Building Resilience and Coping — adaptive responses, three coping types, four levels of action, and tools for difficult moments.
- Professional Roles and Responsibilities — sector-specific strategies, and the truth that everyone has a role.
- Closing Reflections and Final Assessment — what to carry forward, and a 23-question knowledge check.
What Is Climate Change?
Climate change refers to long-term alterations in temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions. It is primarily driven by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun and causing warming. The scientific consensus that current warming is human-caused is summarized in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report (IPCC, 2023). Understanding the multifaceted impacts of climate change is essential for making connections to how a changing climate affects our physical, mental, and emotional health and wellbeing.
Impacts of Climate Change
Click each card to reveal the impact:
Planetary Health
Planetary health is a framework that bridges disciplines together — from earth sciences and ecology to psychology and public health. Articulated in the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission report by Whitmee and colleagues (2015), it emphasizes that human wellbeing is deeply connected to the health of the environment. When natural systems are compromised, it affects the building blocks of human health, including clean air, safe water, healthy food, and stable living conditions. Climate change is one of nine critical planetary boundaries first proposed by Rockström and colleagues (2009) that we need to maintain to ensure our planet remains a stable and safe home for humanity. The most recent assessment by Richardson and colleagues (2023) finds that six of nine boundaries have now been transgressed, highlighting the urgent need for collective action.
How to Read These Figures
Each circle represents the planet at a different point in time (2009, 2015, 2023, and 2025). The nine wedges are the nine planetary boundaries identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre — climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities (such as plastics and synthetic chemicals).
The inner shaded ring marks the safe operating space for humanity. When a wedge stays within the ring, that boundary is being respected. When a wedge extends past the ring into the outer band, that boundary has been crossed — meaning we are operating outside the conditions that have allowed human civilization to flourish for the past 10,000 years.
Comparing the four circles reveals an accelerating trajectory: in 2009, three boundaries had been crossed; by 2015, four; by 2023, six; and by 2025, seven of nine. Climate change is one of those crossed boundaries — and it interacts with the others, which is part of why the planetary health framework treats human and environmental wellbeing as inseparable.
Indigenous Perspectives
Indigenous ways of knowing offer essential perspectives on what is unfolding. From many Indigenous perspectives, climate change is not only a scientific or ecological crisis but also a reflection of disrupted relationships between humans and, in turn, their relationships with the land and non-human relations. As Whyte (2017) argues, climate change can be understood as an intensification of colonial harms already enacted on Indigenous lands and peoples. It represents a profound imbalance in our responsibilities to the natural world.
Where Western frameworks may focus on emissions and temperatures, Indigenous teachings often speak to the spiritual, ethical, and relational consequences of living out of harmony with Creation. Cunsolo and Ellis (2018), drawing on work with Inuit communities in Labrador, describe ecological grief as a mental health response to climate-driven environmental loss — a finding that helps anchor the more abstract idea of "relational crisis" in lived community experience. The call to address climate change, from this view, is also a call to renew our relationships with land, with each other, and with future generations. This relational lens helps expand our understanding of climate health as inseparable from social and emotional wellbeing.
Key Takeaways
- Climate change involves long-term shifts in atmospheric conditions driven primarily by human activities, with widespread impacts on the environment, ecosystems, and human health.
- Planetary health frames human wellbeing as inseparable from environmental health.
- Indigenous perspectives situate climate change as a relational crisis — a breakdown in relationships between humans, land, and non-human relations — and point toward relational approaches to healing.
References — Module 1
Click any citation in the module to jump to the source. All links open in a new tab.
- Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
- IPCC. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, Geneva. https://doi.org/10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647
- Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
- Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472–475. https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a
- Whitmee, S., Haines, A., Beyrer, C., et al. (2015). Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health. The Lancet, 386(10007), 1973–2028. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60901-1
- Whyte, K. (2017). Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55(1–2), 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153
Closing Reflection
What is one idea from this module — about climate change, planetary health, or Indigenous perspectives — that you want to carry into the rest of the course? What would you like to keep paying attention to?
Your response is private — submitting completes the module's reflection requirement.
1. Which of the following best defines climate change?
2. What does the planetary health framework emphasize?
3. From many Indigenous perspectives, climate change represents:
✦ Submit both reflections and pass the knowledge check to continue
Transcript — slide 1
Reflect, read, and check your understanding
Read the full text, sit with the prompts, and complete the knowledge check.
Learning Objectives
- Explain the difference between emotions and mental health conditions, and why this course focuses on emotions.
- Describe the spectrum of climate emotions, including worry, grief, guilt, anger, isolation, denial, ecoparalysis, and hope.
- Recognize that emotional responses to climate change are natural, meaningful signals — not pathology.
Opening Reflection
Think back to a recent moment when climate or environmental news affected you. What did you notice in your body, your thoughts, or your mood? Try to describe it in a few sentences before we name and explore the emotions together.
Your response is private — submitting unlocks the rest of the module's progression.
A Note on Trauma-Informed Care
This module names emotions some readers carry personally. We approach this work through a trauma-informed lens — recognizing that distress about climate change is often layered onto other experiences of loss, displacement, or harm. Six widely-used principles from SAMHSA (2014) guide trauma-informed practice:
- Safety — physical and emotional safety for everyone in the space.
- Trustworthiness & transparency — clarity about what to expect and why.
- Peer support — drawing on shared experience to reduce isolation.
- Collaboration & mutuality — flattening hierarchies in helping relationships.
- Empowerment, voice, and choice — supporting people's agency in their own healing.
- Cultural, historical, and gender considerations — recognizing how identity and history shape experience and access.
Carry these principles with you through the rest of the course — they apply to how you engage your own emotions, and to how you support others.
Emotions, Wellbeing, and Mental Health
Before exploring specific climate emotions, it is important to understand what we mean by emotions and how they relate to mental health and wellbeing. Our understanding of health has evolved considerably over time — from the biomedical model (which focused narrowly on the absence of disease) to the World Health Organization's 1948 definition of health as "complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing." George Engel's biopsychosocial model (1977) further expanded this, recognizing that biological, psychological, and social factors are all essential to health.
Many Indigenous health systems have long conceptualized health as a balance among physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions — inseparable from relationships with land, community, and the living world.
Emotions are meaningful signals about the state of our relationships with the world around us. They should not be viewed as problems to be managed or eliminated, but as important information that can guide action and connection.
How We Understand Emotions: A Brief Theoretical Note
There is no single, settled scientific account of what emotions are. For a long time, basic-emotion theories assumed a small set of universal feelings — fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise — each with its own characteristic facial expression, physiology, and brain signature. Other traditions instead emphasized cognitive appraisal (how we interpret a situation), social and cultural context (how the people and norms around us shape what we feel), or developmental history. Each of these perspectives captured something real about emotion, but none captured everything.
More recent work — most prominently Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017) — argues that emotions are not pre-wired reflexes triggered by events but are actively constructed in the moment. The brain draws on bodily sensations, prior experience, language, and cultural concepts to predict what is happening and assemble an emotional experience that fits. On this view, two people facing the same wildfire smoke can construct quite different emotions — one grief, another rage, another a numb resolve — depending on what their body, history, and culture make available to them.
This is not the final word; the science continues to evolve. The takeaway for this course is more modest: climate emotions are real, meaningful, and variable. They are not universal templates that look the same in everyone, and they are not symptoms to be eliminated. Holding this nuance lightly will help you make sense of why people in similar circumstances — including yourself across different days — can feel very different things, and why no single response will fit everyone.
Emotions vs. Mental Health Conditions
Key Distinction
Emotions are natural, transient responses to circumstances that serve important adaptive functions.
Mental health conditions are persistent, diagnosable patterns that significantly impair daily functioning and require professional intervention.
This course intentionally focuses on emotions to avoid pathologizing healthy responses to genuine threats.
The Spectrum of Climate Emotions
Researchers and practitioners have mapped a broad spectrum of emotional responses to climate change — see, for example, Pihkala's (2022) taxonomy of climate emotions and Ojala and colleagues' (2021) narrative review. The wheel below organizes them into nine overlapping categories. Click any wedge to read what each emotion is. Beneath the wheel, a separate guide walks through how each one tends to show up in everyday life and how to respond — for yourself and for someone you support.
Click any wedge of the wheel to read what that emotion is. Then scroll to the detailed list below to explore how it shows up in everyday life and how to respond — for yourself or for someone you support.
Telling Similar Emotions Apart
Several climate emotions can sound alike but feel — and respond to support — quite differently. Two distinctions worth holding:
Anxiety vs. Anticipatory Stress and Trauma
Climate anxiety is a forward-leaning worry: thoughts circling, "what-if" loops, sleep disturbance after climate news. The body is uncomfortable but not necessarily in alarm.
Anticipatory stress and trauma responses are deeper and more somatic. The body has already shifted into alarm mode — hypervigilance, intrusive memories, startle reactions, numbness — often because of a prior direct experience (a wildfire, flood, evacuation) or because climate threats now feel imminent and personal. Anxiety responds well to bounded news intake, grounding, and small action; trauma responses often need slower, more embodied work, and sometimes professional support.
Denial vs. Ecoparalysis vs. Fatalism
These three can look alike from the outside — someone who isn't taking action — but they come from very different places.
- Denial protects the psyche by keeping the threat out of awareness. The person changes the subject, jokes it off, or focuses on solutions to avoid sitting with the problem.
- Ecoparalysis is what happens when caring has run out of road. The person sees the problem clearly and feels deeply about it, but is so overwhelmed by the scale that they can't move. It often emerges after a period of intense engagement.
- Fatalism is a stance of acceptance that catastrophic outcomes are inevitable. The person believes there is nothing meaningful to be done, so action feels pointless rather than overwhelming.
The implication for support: don't argue someone in denial with more facts; don't pressure someone in ecoparalysis with more asks; don't try to "cheer up" a fatalist into hope. Each calls for a different approach, covered in the panels below and in Module 4.
How These Emotions Show Up — and How to Respond
For each category, expand the panel to see how it tends to manifest (in the body, thoughts, and behaviour), what helps for yourself, and what helps when supporting someone else.
See Clayton & Karazsia (2020) for the most-cited validated measure of climate change anxiety, and Hickman and colleagues' (2021) 10-country survey of young people for the scope of the experience. The broader concept of eco-anxiety is reviewed in Pihkala (2020).
How it shows up: circling thoughts about news headlines, trouble sleeping after climate stories, restlessness or chest tightness, compulsive doomscrolling, irritability with people who seem unconcerned, difficulty concentrating on long-term plans, "what-if" loops about the future.
What helps for yourself: name the feeling (worry is information, not weakness), bound your news intake (set times rather than scrolling continuously), pair worry with one concrete action — however small — to convert helplessness into agency, use grounding techniques when worry escalates into panic.
What helps when supporting others: validate first ("it makes sense to feel this way"), don't reassure with platitudes, ask what they need (information, distraction, a walk, problem-solving) before offering it, share that they are not alone in this — naming the experience reduces shame.
How it shows up: hypervigilance during weather events, intrusive memories or images, nightmares, startle reactions, emotional numbness, avoidance of places or news that bring up the trauma, dread about an event that hasn't yet happened, somatic symptoms (gut tension, headaches, chronic fatigue).
What helps for yourself: grounding techniques (5-4-3-2-1 senses, slow breathing, cold water on hands), routines that reinforce safety, gentle exposure rather than full avoidance, professional support if symptoms persist beyond a few weeks or interfere with daily life — trauma responds well to evidence-based therapy.
What helps when supporting others: create predictability and choice, avoid pressuring them to "talk about it," be present without fixing, recognize anniversary effects of past disasters, gently encourage professional support when appropriate without forcing it.
Solastalgia was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht and colleagues (2007). Cunsolo and Ellis (2018) describe ecological grief as a mental health response to climate-related loss.
How it shows up: sudden waves of sadness triggered by familiar landscapes, mourning species or seasons that have changed, a homesickness experienced while still at home, ambiguous grief that has no closure, withdrawal from places once loved, tearfulness around environmental news, a sense of "phantom limb" for what has been lost.
What helps for yourself: name the loss out loud (climate grief is rarely socially sanctioned, so naming it matters), ritualize where possible — write, walk, photograph, plant — give yourself permission to grieve without a "fix," join a climate grief circle or community of others who get it.
What helps when supporting others: resist the urge to silver-line; sit with the loss as you would any bereavement, acknowledge the legitimacy of grieving non-human beings or places, mark losses ceremonially (a planting, a gathering, a moment of silence), check in around anniversaries and seasonal markers.
How it shows up: rumination over past consumption choices, hyper-focus on personal carbon footprint, self-criticism that becomes paralysing, withdrawal from activities tied to identity, perfectionism about lifestyle changes, feeling that one is part of a "bad" species or generation, defensive responses when others raise climate topics.
What helps for yourself: distinguish guilt (about an action) from shame (about the self) — guilt can motivate; shame more often paralyses, locate your contribution in proportion to structural drivers, redirect energy from rumination into one chosen action that aligns with your values, practise self-compassion explicitly.
What helps when supporting others: avoid amplifying personal guilt as a motivator (it usually backfires), name structural responsibility alongside individual choice, model imperfection — share your own contradictions and how you live with them, redirect toward collective action rather than individual purity.
How it shows up: heat or tightness in the chest when reading about inaction, snapping at family or colleagues, cynicism toward institutions, fantasies of confrontation, difficulty being present in everyday tasks because the wider injustice keeps intruding, burnout from sustained outrage, alienation from people who seem complacent.
What helps for yourself: respect anger as a moral signal — it is telling you something important — channel it into structured action (organizing, advocacy, writing) rather than diffuse fuming, build in recovery so anger doesn't tip into burnout, separate moral clarity (the system is unjust) from interpersonal hostility (the cashier in front of you is not the system).
What helps when supporting others: validate the anger without trying to defuse it, help them locate where the anger most accurately belongs (institutions, structures), connect them to organizing communities that can hold the energy, watch for signs of burnout and gently name them.
How it shows up: feeling unable to bring up climate topics with family, friends, or colleagues, "climate silence" in social settings, a quiet sense that one is grieving alone, drifting away from people who seem disengaged, online overuse to find others who get it (sometimes helpful, sometimes corrosive), shame for caring "too much."
What helps for yourself: seek out spaces — climate cafés, faith groups, peer circles — where the topic is welcomed, find one trusted person you can be honest with, recognize that the silence reflects a social condition (climate isn't part of normal small talk yet), don't take it as evidence that you are alone.
What helps when supporting others: simply acknowledging climate concerns out loud breaks the silence, ask how they are doing about it specifically rather than waiting for them to raise it, share resources or local groups, model the conversation so others learn it's possible to have.
Norgaard (2011) reframes denial as a socially organized response to overwhelming threat rather than a moral failing; Stoknes (2014) analyses the "psychological climate paradox" of caring without acting.
How it shows up: changing the subject when climate is raised, dismissive humour, intellectualizing without feeling, hyper-focus on solutions to avoid sitting with the problem, "I just can't think about that right now," disengagement after periods of intense engagement, sometimes outright rejection of the science.
What helps for yourself: notice when avoidance is protective (it sometimes is, briefly) versus when it is calcifying, re-engage gently — through a person you trust, a story rather than statistics, or a small action — recognize that disengagement after prolonged intense engagement may signal burnout, not apathy.
What helps when supporting others: avoid confrontation and information dumps — they tend to deepen denial, ask open questions about what they care about and connect from there, share your own emotional truth rather than facts, give time and follow up, recognize that movement is usually slow and non-linear.
Searle & Gow (2010) document the link between climate worry and immobilizing distress; Pihkala (2022) situates ecoparalysis within the wider taxonomy of climate emotions.
How it shows up: "what's the point" thinking, abandoning previously held practices, doom-leaning humour, oscillation between bursts of action and total withdrawal, decision-fatigue around any climate-relevant choice, drift toward nihilistic communities online.
What helps for yourself: shrink the unit of action — choose one tiny, achievable thing and do it, prioritize collective action over solo effort (collective efficacy is a known antidote to fatalism), limit prolonged exposure to doomist media voices, restore basic rest and nutrition; ecoparalysis often rides on top of physical depletion.
What helps when supporting others: don't try to argue them into hope, do something small alongside them rather than urging them to act, share concrete examples of meaningful change — local, partial, honest — rather than abstract optimism, watch for signs that paralysis has tipped into clinical depression and gently support a path to professional help.
Ojala (2012) finds that constructive hope — rather than denial-based hope — predicts sustained climate engagement in young people; see also Ojala (2013) on meaning-focused coping.
How it shows up: renewed energy after time in community, capacity to hold difficulty alongside possibility, motivation that survives setbacks, willingness to engage in projects whose outcomes are uncertain, gratitude that coexists with grief, a felt sense that what one does matters even if it isn't enough on its own.
What helps for yourself: treat hope as a practice rather than a mood — return to it deliberately, anchor it in concrete, witnessed change rather than vague optimism, surround yourself with people who model engaged hope, build in rest and joy; sustainable hope requires energy reserves.
What helps when supporting others: don't impose hope on someone in grief or anger — let it emerge, share specific examples that honour both the reality and the possibility, celebrate small wins together, model that hope and despair can coexist without one cancelling the other.
References — Module 2
Click any citation in the module to jump to the source. All links open in a new tab.
- Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., et al. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(sup1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288
- Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw154
- Clayton, S., & Karazsia, B. T. (2020). Development and validation of a measure of climate change anxiety. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 69, 101434. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101434
- Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
- Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460
- Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., et al. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3
- Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015448.001.0001
- Ojala, M. (2012). Hope and climate change: The importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 625–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2011.637157
- Ojala, M. (2013). Coping with climate change among adolescents: Implications for subjective well-being and environmental engagement. Sustainability, 5(5), 2191–2209. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5052191
- Ojala, M., Cunsolo, A., Ogunbode, C. A., & Middleton, J. (2021). Anxiety, worry, and grief in a time of environmental and climate crisis: A narrative review. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46, 35–58. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-022716
- Pihkala, P. (2020). Anxiety and the ecological crisis: An analysis of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. Sustainability, 12(19), 7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197836
- Pihkala, P. (2022). Toward a taxonomy of climate emotions. Frontiers in Climate, 3, 738154. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154
- SAMHSA. (2014). SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach (HHS Publication No. SMA 14-4884). Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://library.samhsa.gov/product/samhsas-concept-trauma-and-guidance-trauma-informed-approach/sma14-4884
- Searle, K., & Gow, K. (2010). Do concerns about climate change lead to distress? International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, 2(4), 362–379. https://doi.org/10.1108/17568691011089891
- Stoknes, P. E. (2014). Rethinking climate communications and the "psychological climate paradox." Energy Research & Social Science, 1, 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.03.007
- World Health Organization. (1948). Constitution of the World Health Organization. Geneva: WHO. https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution
Closing Reflection
Which of the nine emotions do you identify with most strongly? Has this changed over time? How have these emotions influenced your personal or professional life?
Your response is private — submitting completes the module's reflection requirement.
1. Why does this course focus on emotions rather than mental health diagnoses?
2. What is solastalgia?
3. Which statement about climate denial is most accurate?
4. What distinguishes hope from naive optimism in the climate context?
5. Ecoparalysis is best described as:
✦ Submit both reflections and pass the knowledge check to continue
Transcript — slide 1
Reflect, read, and check your understanding
Use the static content below to explore at your own pace.
Learning Objectives
- Identify social, environmental, and developmental factors that influence climate emotional responses.
- Explain how climate emotions evolve across the lifespan.
- Recognize how marginalization and intersectionality shape climate-related mental health outcomes.
Pause Before You Reflect
This module asks you to think about other people's emotional lives, including people who carry heavier climate burdens than you. Before you begin, take about a minute to settle:
- Place both feet flat on the floor and notice the contact.
- Take a slow breath in through your nose for a count of four; let it out through your mouth for a count of six.
- Repeat three times. Notice — without judgment — anything that surfaces in your body or mood.
No need to clear your mind. The point is simply to arrive before you write.
Opening Reflection
Consider the people in your life who feel climate change differently than you do — more intensely, less intensely, or just differently. What do you imagine accounts for that difference? Hold onto your guesses as we work through what shapes emotional responses.
How much to write: a short paragraph — about three to five sentences, or 50–100 words. You don't need a polished answer; rough notes are fine.
Your response is private — submitting unlocks the rest of the module's progression.
Understanding the Causes of Climate Emotions
Climate emotions are not random reactions. They are functional responses to real threats — rising sea levels, extreme weather, environmental degradation, and social inequalities. Doherty and Clayton (2011) provide a foundational psychological account. The biopsychosocial model helps us understand that biological factors (such as genetic predisposition and physiological stress responses), psychological factors (such as personality, coping style, and cognitive appraisals), and social factors (such as community support, cultural context, and socioeconomic status) all interact to shape our emotional responses to climate change.
Social and Environmental Drivers
Direct exposure to climate-related events — such as wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and extreme heat — is one of the most significant drivers of climate distress (Berry, Bowen, & Kjellstrom, 2010). However, indirect exposure through media consumption, anticipatory worry about future events, and awareness of environmental degradation also contribute substantially. Key factors include:
- Geographic vulnerability (living in flood zones, fire-prone areas, or heat islands)
- Socioeconomic status and access to resources for adaptation
- Quality and availability of social support networks
- Media exposure and information environments
- Connection to land, culture, and place
- Access to green spaces and nature
A Lifecourse Perspective
Climate emotions are not static — they shift across the arc of a life. Each developmental stage carries its own concerns (forming an identity, raising children, watching grandchildren grow up, witnessing decades of change), its own resources for coping, and its own constraints. The same wildfire season that registers as existential dread for a fifteen-year-old may register as grief for an eighty-year-old who remembers what the forest was, and as compounded caregiving fatigue for the forty-year-old between them. Sanson, Van Hoorn, & Burke (2019) and Léger-Goodes and colleagues (2022) document the particular weight of climate distress in children and youth. A lifecourse lens reminds us that climate emotion is shaped not only by what is happening now but by where someone is in their life and what they have already lived through.
Below is a brief sketch of how climate emotions can show up across four broad life stages. Real lives don't fit neatly into stages — these are starting points, not boxes.
Children and Adolescents — "What kind of future will I have?"
Growing awareness of the climate crisis combined with limited agency can generate intense eco-anxiety and existential dread. Surveys consistently find that this age group reports the highest levels of climate-related distress. Without supportive adults and opportunities for meaningful engagement, that distress can curdle into despair; with them, it can channel into activism, creativity, and sustained moral concern. Schools, parents, and youth programs play an outsized role in shaping which trajectory emerges.
In real life: Maya, age 14, started having panic attacks after a unit on rising sea levels. She also organized a school clothing-swap with three friends. Both responses are real — and both are common in this age group. The teacher who connected her panic to her organizing helped her keep moving.
Early Adulthood — "Who am I becoming, and what world am I building into?"
Climate emotions in this stage are entangled with formative life decisions: career choice, partnering, having children, where to live. Guilt and shame about carbon footprint are common, alongside grief for futures imagined and uncertainty about whether to bring children into a warming world. Identity is consolidating, which means the values and habits formed here often carry forward for decades. This is a critical period for connection — peer communities and trusted mentors can keep young adults from absorbing climate distress as personal failure.
In real life: Jordan, 28, switched from a corporate marketing role to climate-tech communications. The career change felt meaningful, but they're newly unsure whether to have kids — and find that climate worry now interrupts what should be straightforward conversations with their partner.
Midlife — "What am I responsible for, and what am I leaving behind?"
Climate emotions here often blend grief for losses already accumulating with frustration at the slow pace of change. Caregiving responsibilities (children, ageing parents, communities) shape how the emotions are felt and expressed. Midlife adults often have more established networks and influence to draw on, but they may also be the most stretched — career, caregiving, and community obligations stacking up under climate-amplified stress. Burnout is a real risk; sustainable engagement matters more than intensity.
In real life: Sam, 47, is parenting two anxious teenagers, supporting a parent through wildfire-driven displacement, and trying to hold down a demanding job. They want to do "more" on climate but can barely keep up with daily logistics. The grief and frustration aren't loud — they're underneath everything.
Older Adults — "I've watched this change. What can I pass on?"
Decades of lived experience produce a particular form of climate grief — solastalgia for landscapes, species, and seasonal patterns that have shifted within a single lifetime. Older adults can serve as wisdom-keepers, offering historical perspective and intergenerational anchoring that younger people often lack. They may also face exclusion from climate movements through ageism or accessibility barriers. Honouring their witness, while making engagement physically and culturally accessible, is part of an intergenerational response.
In real life: Eleanor, 78, can describe the trout creek behind her childhood farm in detail — and the dry bed it has become. She rarely uses the word "grief," but it's there. When her granddaughter invited her to a climate-storytelling night at the local library, Eleanor's account of the creek changed how everyone in the room understood what was being lost.
These stages interact: a parent's climate worry is not separate from their child's; an elder's grief shapes the family's emotional climate. Intergenerational dialogue — children, parents, elders together — often metabolizes climate emotions better than any one generation can alone.
Population Impacts and Inequities
Climate change does not affect everyone equally. Marginalized communities — including Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, people living in poverty, persons with disabilities, gender-diverse people, and communities in the Global South — often bear the greatest burden of climate impacts while having contributed least to the crisis. Berberian, Gonzalez, & Cushing (2022) review the racial disparities in climate-related health effects in the United States, and Middleton and colleagues (2020) summarize the global literature on Indigenous mental health in a changing climate. These inequities compound existing health disparities and create additional layers of climate-related emotional distress. The emotions are not just bigger; they sit on top of histories of harm, displacement, and exclusion (see environmental racism) that long pre-date the climate crisis.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality, a concept developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989; 1991), describes how overlapping systems of power — racism, sexism, classism, ableism, colonialism, heteronormativity — combine to produce experiences that cannot be explained by any single factor on its own. A person's climate emotions cannot be understood in isolation from the broader social structures that shape their lived experience.
What Are "Intersecting Identities"?
Each person holds many identities at once — for example, a person might be a young Black woman who is also a single mother, also a renter, also living with a chronic illness. Each of those identities shapes how she experiences the world. Intersecting identities is the recognition that these identities don't sit side by side independently — they interact, and the interaction produces something distinct.
A quick illustration: a heatwave does not affect "women" as a single category. It affects a young, healthy, well-housed woman differently than it affects an older woman with a heart condition who lives on the top floor of a building without air conditioning. Race, age, income, disability, and housing all shape that experience together. To talk about "women and climate" without those interactions misses the people who are most exposed.
The shorthand: identities don't stack — they combine. The result is a single, compounded experience, not a sum of separate experiences.
Two further illustrations of how this plays out:
- An Indigenous woman in a coastal community may carry colonial dispossession of her people's land, gendered caregiving expectations during disasters, and economic constraints on her ability to relocate. Her climate grief is not three separate griefs added together — it is a single, compounded experience of land, gender, and economic harm at once.
- A disabled Black man in a heat-island neighbourhood may face mobility barriers to cooling centres, racial disinvestment in his neighbourhood's infrastructure, and medical systems that have historically not believed his pain. His climate distress is shaped by ableism, racism, and economic inequality moving together.
Intersectionality does two things for climate-mental-health work. First, it sharpens our diagnosis: it tells us why generic interventions often fail communities at the margins. Second, it points to better solutions — culturally grounded, community-led, designed with rather than for the people most affected. Equity is not a side note in climate-mental-health practice; it is structural to whether our responses actually work.
Scenario Vignettes
Consider each person's experience and the factors shaping their climate emotions:
Amara, age 16
Amara learned about climate projections in science class and now struggles to sleep, worrying about the future. Her parents dismiss her concerns as "overreacting." She has started attending climate strikes but feels exhausted.
What developmental, social, and emotional factors are shaping Amara's experience? What kind of support might help?
David, age 55
David is a farmer whose land has been affected by repeated droughts. He feels a deep sense of loss watching the landscape he grew up on change beyond recognition. He avoids climate news and has withdrawn from community events.
What climate emotions might David be experiencing? How do his age, livelihood, and connection to land shape his response?
Priya, new mother
Priya is a new mother in a low-income neighbourhood that floods regularly. She worries about her child's future and feels angry that wealthier areas receive more flood protection funding. She also carries guilt about the environmental impact of raising a child.
How do intersecting factors — socioeconomic status, gender, geography, and parenthood — shape Priya's climate emotions?
Key Takeaways
- Climate emotions are shaped by the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors — not by individual vulnerability alone.
- Direct and indirect exposure to climate impacts, social support, and access to resources all influence emotional responses.
- Climate emotions evolve across the lifespan, with each developmental stage presenting distinct challenges and strengths.
- Marginalization and intersectionality create compounded climate distress, requiring equity-centred approaches to support.
References — Module 3
Click any citation in the module to jump to the source. All links open in a new tab.
- Berberian, A. G., Gonzalez, D. J. X., & Cushing, L. J. (2022). Racial disparities in climate change-related health effects in the United States. Current Environmental Health Reports, 9(3), 451–464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-022-00360-w
- Berry, H. L., Bowen, K., & Kjellstrom, T. (2010). Climate change and mental health: A causal pathways framework. International Journal of Public Health, 55(2), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-009-0112-0
- Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), Article 8, 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/
- Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
- Doherty, T. J., & Clayton, S. (2011). The psychological impacts of global climate change. American Psychologist, 66(4), 265–276. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023141
- Léger-Goodes, T., Malboeuf-Hurtubise, C., Mastine, T., Généreux, M., Paradis, P.-O., & Camden, C. (2022). Eco-anxiety in children: A scoping review of the mental health impacts of the awareness of climate change. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 872544. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872544
- Middleton, J., Cunsolo, A., Jones-Bitton, A., Wright, C. J., & Harper, S. L. (2020). Indigenous mental health in a changing climate: A systematic scoping review of the global literature. Environmental Research Letters, 15(5), 053001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab68a9
- Sanson, A. V., Van Hoorn, J., & Burke, S. E. L. (2019). Responding to the impacts of the climate crisis on children and youth. Child Development Perspectives, 13(4), 201–207. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12342
Closing Reflection
Think about someone you know — or yourself — whose climate emotions are shaped by factors from this module (life stage, exposure, marginalization, or intersecting identities). What does that lens reveal that you hadn't considered before, and how might it change how you understand or support them?
Your response is private — submitting completes the module's reflection requirement.
1. The biopsychosocial model explains that climate emotions are shaped by:
2. Which age group often experiences climate distress compounded by limited agency?
3. Intersectionality helps us understand that:
4. Which of the following is NOT identified as a driver of climate emotions?
✦ Submit both reflections and pass the knowledge check to continue
Transcript — slide 1
Reflect, read, and check your understanding
Use the static content below to explore at your own pace.
Learning Objectives
- Distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive responses to climate distress.
- Identify and apply three types of coping: problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-focused.
- Recognize that resilience is built across four levels — individual, organizational/familial, community, and systemic — and that no single level can carry the work alone.
- Describe the role of hope, validation, and practical skills in building climate resilience.
Opening Reflection
What do you currently do — intentionally or instinctively — when climate-related distress shows up for you? Note one thing that helps and one thing that doesn't. We'll examine why some responses sustain us while others wear us down.
Your response is private — submitting unlocks the rest of the module's progression.
Adaptive vs. Maladaptive Responses
Not all responses to climate distress are equally helpful. The key distinction is between adaptive responses — which preserve wellbeing and foster meaningful action — and maladaptive responses — which lead to paralysis, avoidance, or destructive patterns. This distinction draws on Lazarus and Folkman's foundational stress and coping framework (Folkman & Lazarus, 1988). Importantly, the emotions themselves are not the problem; it is how we respond to them that matters.
Adaptive responses include constructive problem-solving, seeking social support, channelling anxiety into advocacy, finding meaning in collective action, and practicing emotional regulation while maintaining engagement.
Maladaptive responses include chronic avoidance and denial, catastrophizing without action, suppressing emotions until burnout, isolating oneself, and engaging in nihilism or fatalism.
Key Insight
The balance between acknowledging the severity of the crisis and maintaining the capacity to act is at the heart of adaptive coping. Emotions are not obstacles to action — they are often the fuel for it, when channelled constructively.
Three Types of Coping
The problem-focused and emotion-focused distinction was developed by Lazarus and Folkman (1988); meaning-focused coping was elaborated by Park (2010). Ojala (2013) has been particularly influential in applying these three modes to climate-related coping.
Problem-Focused Coping
Taking direct action to address the source of stress. In the climate context, this might include home-preparedness measures, joining community adaptation efforts, lobbying for policy change, or changing personal consumption patterns.
Problem-focused coping is most effective when the stressor is at least partially within one's control. It transforms helplessness into purposeful engagement.
Emotion-Focused Coping
Regulating emotional responses when external situations feel difficult to change. This includes talk therapy, time in green spaces, mindfulness practices, expressive writing, and seeking comfort from trusted relationships.
Emotion-focused coping prevents burnout and emotional numbness by helping us process difficult feelings without being consumed by them.
Meaning-Focused Coping
Finding purpose and significance in adversity (Park, 2010). This might involve reframing activism as a moral calling, developing new skills related to sustainability, connecting climate action to one's values and identity, or deriving meaning from intergenerational responsibility.
Meaning-focused coping sustains engagement over the long term by connecting action to a larger sense of purpose (Ojala, 2013).
In Practice
The most effective approach blends all three types flexibly. For example, a person might volunteer for a community resilience initiative (problem-focused), attend a climate grief support circle (emotion-focused), and view their work as part of a larger movement for justice (meaning-focused).
Four Levels of Action
Coping with climate emotions is rarely a solo project. Sustainable resilience grows when action is happening at four interlocking levels at once — individual practices supported by close relationships, neighbours and peers, and the larger systems that shape our daily lives. Strategies at any one level have limits; the four levels together are what carry people over the long term.
Telling Organizational/Familial Apart from Community
The line between these two levels can feel fuzzy. A useful rule of thumb: organizational and familial covers the small groups you are already inside — your household, your immediate team or workplace, your closest circle. The relationships are personal and largely closed; you know everyone by name. Community covers the wider networks of neighbours, congregants, peers, and place-based groups that you can join, build, or step into and out of. The relationships are more distributed and more public.
Concretely: a Sunday-night climate conversation with your partner sits at the familial level; the climate café you attend at the library sits at the community level. The same person, a parent who is also a faith-community member, is acting at the familial level when she lets her child name fear at bedtime, and at the community level when she helps organize a parish climate-grief circle.
What you do for yourself
- Grounding, breathing, and mindfulness
- Time in nature and movement
- Personal limits on news and social media
- Reflective practices — journaling, art, prayer
- Naming and validating your own emotions
Concrete example: Setting your phone to greyscale after 9 p.m. so you stop doomscrolling, and replacing the first hour of your day with a walk instead of news.
Households, teams, and small groups
- Climate-informed conversations with family
- Workplace policies that name climate distress
- Trauma-informed practice in your team
- Mutual care agreements with close people
- Modelling honest, age-appropriate dialogue with children
Concrete example: Adding a "how are you doing about climate this week?" question to your team's Monday check-in, or making it a household practice to name losses (the lake, the bird, the season) as they happen.
Neighbours, networks, and place
- Climate cafés and grief circles
- Mutual aid and emergency-readiness networks
- Local restoration, gardening, and stewardship
- Faith and cultural community gatherings
- Peer-led skill shares and support groups
Concrete example: Joining a neighbourhood block-captain network for emergency preparedness, attending a monthly climate café at the library, or co-organizing a local Indigenous-led river-restoration day.
Policies, institutions, and systems
- Mental health funding for climate-affected regions
- Equitable adaptation policy and just transitions
- Health-system protocols for climate distress
- Curriculum reform integrating climate & emotions
- Advocacy that names mental health in climate plans
Concrete example: Writing your municipal council to request mental-health metrics in the city's climate adaptation plan, supporting a candidate whose platform includes just-transition policy, or pushing your professional college to update its scope-of-practice guidance for climate distress.
The Role of Hope
Hope is not a luxury in the climate context — it is a necessity. Researchers have described several important forms:
- Radical Hope (Jonathan Lear, 2006): Belief in a future good that we cannot yet fully imagine.
- Active Hope (Joanna Macy & Johnstone, 2012): A participatory stance — not waiting for hope to arrive, but practising it through awareness, gratitude, and creative collaboration.
- Stubborn Optimism (Christiana Figueres & Rivett-Carnac, 2020): Clear-eyed acceptance of the facts alongside determined conviction that solutions exist.
- Hope Theory (C. R. Snyder, 2002): Goal-setting, pathway thinking, and agency thinking as structured approaches to cultivating hope.
Constructive, engagement-supporting hope in climate-aware young people has been studied empirically by Ojala (2012).
Acknowledging and Validating Climate Emotions
Before we can cope effectively, we must first acknowledge and validate what we are feeling. Validation — from therapists, peers, communities, and institutions — reduces isolation, builds trust, and creates the psychological safety needed for honest engagement.
Guided Breathing Exercise
Let's take a moment to practise a grounding technique called box breathing. Click "Start" to begin:
Click Start when you're ready
When a Difficult Emotion Arrives — Moving Through It
Recognizing a climate emotion is one thing. Knowing what to do when it surges through you — at the kitchen table, mid-meeting, in the car after the news — is another. The practices below are short, learnable, and meant for the moment of difficulty itself, not for later. None of them resolves the underlying climate situation. What they do is prevent the emotion from running you, so you can stay present and choose a next step.
A Five-Step "In the Moment" Sequence
- Name it. Silently or out loud: "this is climate grief," "this is anger about that headline." Naming alone reduces the intensity by activating the parts of the brain that regulate the parts that are reacting.
- Locate it in the body. Where do you feel it? Tight chest? Buzzing in the limbs? Heaviness behind the eyes? Just notice — no need to change anything.
- Lengthen the exhale. Three to five breaths where the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. (Box breathing above is one option; "in for 4, out for 6" is simpler.) The lengthened exhale signals safety to the nervous system.
- Anchor to the present. The 5-4-3-2-1 senses exercise: name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste. Or simpler: feel both feet on the floor and notice three textures around you.
- Choose one small next step. Not the perfect step — any step that aligns with what you care about. Send the email. Drink the water. Text the friend. Step outside. The step doesn't fix the climate; it converts paralysis into agency for the next minute.
Other In-the-Moment Tools to Have on Hand
- Cold water on the wrists or face. A short, sharp signal to the vagus nerve that calms acute panic within 30–60 seconds. Useful when grounding alone isn't enough.
- Bilateral movement. Walk briskly for two minutes, swing your arms, or tap left-right on your knees. Bilateral stimulation helps the brain process intense emotional material without becoming flooded.
- The "two-by-two." Step outside for two minutes; look at two things further than 20 feet away. Pulling the gaze out of close-up screen distance shifts the nervous system out of threat mode.
- Self-compassion phrase. Place a hand on your heart and silently say, "this is hard, and it makes sense to feel this way." Validating yourself is foundational — and it is also, in the moment, a tool.
- Reach for a person, not the news. When a wave hits, the instinct is often to grab the phone and consume more. Try the opposite: text one person ("difficult moment with the news, no need to fix") and put the phone face-down for ten minutes.
Pick two or three of these to practise when you are not in distress, so they're available when you are. Tools you've never used rarely come to mind in the moment.
Coping Strategies You Can Try This Week
If reading about climate emotions has surfaced something for you, consider trying one or two of the following over the next seven days. None require special training, money, or large blocks of time. The point is not to do all of them — it's to pick one or two and notice what shifts.
- 10 minutes outside, screen-free, before noon
- One night of phone out of the bedroom
- One short walk after the news
- The five-step in-the-moment sequence (above), once daily
- One honest sentence to a trusted person — "the news has been weighing on me"
- A short check-in question with a child or family member ("anything you've been thinking about that's hard?")
- An invitation: ask one friend to take a walk and talk about the climate stuff you usually skip
- Attend or sign up for one community event — a climate café, a planting day, a grief circle
- Write one paragraph about what you most want to protect, and read it back to yourself
- Take one small action aligned with your values — a single email, a single donation, a single conversation
- Set a daily time-cap on climate news (15–20 minutes is a common starting place)
- Move from doom-leaning sources to one solutions-oriented source (e.g., a curated newsletter)
- Mute or unfollow accounts whose tone leaves you flattened rather than informed
Coping Together: Collective and Community-Based Approaches
Climate emotions are shared emotions. They are responses to a collective situation, and the most consistent research finding in this field is that the most reliable antidote to climate distress is not individual self-care alone — it is being in honest, ongoing relationship with other people who take the situation seriously. Individual practices matter, but they tend to wear thin without a "we" around them.
Several established formats — many of which you can attend or organize without specialized training — make collective coping concrete:
- Climate cafés. A facilitated, time-limited group conversation (usually 60–90 minutes) where people gather to talk honestly about climate emotions. No fix, no debate — just structured, non-judgmental sharing. Often hosted at libraries, faith spaces, universities, or community centres.
- Climate grief circles. A more contemplative cousin of the climate café. Often draws on rituals from grief work, contemplative traditions, or Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects. Helpful when grief is the dominant emotion.
- Peer support spaces. Less formal than a café — for example, a recurring walk-and-talk with a friend, a colleague slack channel for climate news, or a small text thread of people who agree to check in on each other after major climate events.
- Group dialogue formats. World Café, Listening Circles, Restorative Circles, and similar structured-conversation formats can be adapted for climate topics. They work well in workplaces, congregations, and classrooms where unfacilitated conversation might get tense.
- Action communities. Joining a sustained group that does something together — mutual aid, restoration, advocacy, organizing — is itself a form of collective coping. The doing matters, but so does the steady company of people who share the orientation.
- Faith and cultural communities. Many traditions already have practices for grief, hope, and collective meaning-making. Climate-attuned faith leaders are increasingly weaving climate themes into existing rituals — a form of collective coping that often reaches people who would never attend a "climate event."
The shared insight across these formats: naming a climate emotion alone in your kitchen is helpful; naming it with people who recognize it is transformative. If you can attend only one collective format, attending it consistently over time matters more than which one you choose.
More Resilience Strategies
Nature-Based Approaches
Engaging with natural environments — through forest bathing, gardening, outdoor recreation, or simply spending time near green spaces — supports emotional regulation and restores a sense of connectedness to the biosphere. Bratman, Hamilton, & Daily (2012) and Hartig and colleagues (2014) review the cognitive and mental-health benefits of nature contact; Hansen, Jones, & Tocchini (2017) summarize the evidence on Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) specifically.
Somatic and Movement-Based Practices
Somatic practices — including yoga, tai chi, progressive muscle relaxation, and dance — help release tension, regulate the nervous system, and support emotional processing. Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2009) offers one widely-used model for understanding why slow breathing and other body-based practices help shift the autonomic nervous system out of threat mode.
Social Connection and Community Engagement
Addressing climate emotions in community — through support groups, climate cafés, peer support networks, and collective action initiatives — counters isolation and builds collective efficacy.
Specific Therapeutic Approaches
For people whose climate distress crosses into clinical territory — chronic anxiety, traumatic stress, depression, or persistent functional impairment — several established therapeutic modalities have been adapted for climate-related concerns. None is a cure-all, and choice of approach depends on the person, the presenting symptoms, and the practitioner. The cards below are meant as an orientation, not a prescription. Key foundational citations include Hayes and colleagues (2006) on ACT, Shapiro (1989) on EMDR, Kabat-Zinn (1982) on MBSR, and Bisson and colleagues' Cochrane review (2013) of psychological therapies for PTSD.
Click each card to flip it and reveal what the approach offers.
(CBT)
(ACT)
(EMDR, TF-CBT, Somatic Experiencing)
(MBCT, MBSR)
Matching Approach to Need
For most non-clinical climate distress, peer support, community engagement, and the resilience practices above are the right starting place. Therapeutic referral is appropriate when distress is persistent, impairs daily life, or involves trauma that hasn't resolved with time and social support. A culturally responsive, climate-literate practitioner is more important than a specific brand of therapy.
Ten Principles for Climate Mental Health
A recent MHCCA evidence synthesis by Higgs, Palmer-Fluevog & Card (2024) distilled the climate-mental-health literature into ten guiding principles. They organize much of what this module has covered — and extend it outward into the justice, trauma-informed, and community-led dimensions that run through the course as a whole. Treat them as an anchoring framework: a checklist you can return to for your own resilience practice, and as a guide when you are supporting other people.
The Ten Principles (preserved as published)
- Cultivate Accurate Climate Literacy: Guide individuals in gaining a precise understanding of climate change impacts relevant to their lives.
- Embrace Climate Realities with Emotional Diversity: Support individuals in acknowledging climate change realities and navigating through the spectrum of emotions that arise, fostering emotional resilience.
- Inspire Optimism for the Future: Encourage the cultivation of hope and positive outlooks towards the future amidst ecological challenges.
- Strengthen Social Connections: Encourage the development of meaningful relationships with others, emphasizing shared experiences and support.
- Enhance Nature Bonding: Promote deeper connections with the natural world, reinforcing the emotional and psychological benefits of nature engagement.
- Expand Emotional Resilience and Coping Repertoires: Equip individuals with a variety of strategies for emotional regulation, coping, and mindfulness, building resilience against stressors to address diverse challenges.
- Champion Climate Justice: Advocate for fairness and equity in climate-related issues, recognizing the importance of decolonization and justice in mental health impacts.
- Integrate a Trauma-Informed and Culturally Safe Approach: Recognize the inequitable and potentially traumatic impacts of climate change and advocate for approaches that address inequities and support comprehensive safety and well-being.
- Empower Community-led Adaptation: Promote leadership within communities to co-design tailored adaptation strategies, ensuring interventions meet local needs effectively.
- Adopt a Collective Responsibility Approach: Foster a societal-wide perspective that transcends individualism, emphasizing collective action and responsibility for community well-being in the face of ecological changes.
Key Takeaways
- Adaptive responses preserve wellbeing and foster action; the emotions themselves are not the problem — our responses to them are what matters.
- Effective coping blends problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-focused strategies flexibly.
- Sustainable resilience requires action at all four levels — individual, organizational/familial, community, and systemic — each reinforcing the others.
- Hope — in its radical, active, and stubborn forms — is essential for sustained climate engagement.
- Validation and acknowledgment of emotions are foundational to resilience.
- Practical skills including grounding, nature connection, somatic practices, and community engagement build resilience over time.
- The ten principles for climate mental health (Higgs, Palmer-Fluevog & Card, 2024) offer a synthesis to return to — covering literacy, emotional diversity, optimism, social and nature connection, expanded coping, justice, trauma-informed practice, community-led adaptation, and collective responsibility.
References — Module 4
Click any citation in the module to jump to the source. All links open in a new tab.
- Bisson, J. I., Roberts, N. P., Andrew, M., Cooper, R., & Lewis, C. (2013). Psychological therapies for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 12, CD003388. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD003388.pub4
- Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., & Daily, G. C. (2012). The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1249(1), 118–136. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06400.x
- Figueres, C., & Rivett-Carnac, T. (2020). The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis. Knopf. https://www.globaloptimism.com/christiana-figueres
- Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1988). The relationship between coping and emotion: Implications for theory and research. Social Science & Medicine, 26(3), 309–317. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(88)90395-4
- Hansen, M. M., Jones, R., & Tocchini, K. (2017). Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and nature therapy: A state-of-the-art review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(8), 851. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14080851
- Hartig, T., Mitchell, R., de Vries, S., & Frumkin, H. (2014). Nature and health. Annual Review of Public Health, 35, 207–228. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-032013-182443
- Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and commitment therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006
- Higgs, K. D., Palmer-Fluevog, A., & Card, K. G. (2024). Understanding the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change and How to Address Them: A Review of Climate-Related Emotions and Corresponding Mental Health Approaches. Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance. MHCCA Evidence Synthesis (PDF)
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation. General Hospital Psychiatry, 4(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/0163-8343(82)90026-3
- Lear, J. (2006). Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027466
- Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (2012). Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy. New World Library. https://www.activehope.info/
- Ojala, M. (2012). Hope and climate change: The importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 625–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2011.637157
- Ojala, M. (2013). Coping with climate change among adolescents: Implications for subjective well-being and environmental engagement. Sustainability, 5(5), 2191–2209. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5052191
- Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
- Porges, S. W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(Suppl 2), S86–S90. https://doi.org/10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.17
- Shapiro, F. (1989). Efficacy of the eye movement desensitization procedure in the treatment of traumatic memories. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2(2), 199–223. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490020207
- Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
Closing Reflection
Across the four levels of action — individual, organizational/familial, community, and systemic — which feels most natural to you, and which feels hardest to access? Name one concrete resilience practice you could try at one of those levels this week.
Your response is private — submitting completes the module's reflection requirement.
1. What is the key distinction between adaptive and maladaptive responses?
2. Meaning-focused coping involves:
3. Active Hope, as described by Joanna Macy, is best understood as:
4. Why is validation of climate emotions considered foundational to resilience?
5. Which is an example of problem-focused coping in the climate context?
✦ Submit both reflections and pass the knowledge check to continue
Transcript — slide 1
Reflect, read, and check your understanding
Use the static content below to explore at your own pace.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize the ethical responsibility of professionals across sectors to address climate-related mental health.
- Identify sector-specific strategies for integrating mental health awareness into climate work.
- Appreciate the importance of a whole-of-society approach to climate-mental health support.
- Recognize that everyone — not only professionals — plays a role in supporting climate-mental health, often as a listening ear or a steady presence.
Opening Reflection
What is your role — professional, personal, or both — in the world right now? How might climate-related emotional wellbeing show up in that role, even if it isn't in your formal job description? You don't need to be a clinician to make a difference.
Your response is private — submitting unlocks the rest of the module's progression.
Professional Responsibility in a Changing Climate
Climate change is no longer a distant or abstract issue — it is affecting the people and communities that professionals across all sectors serve. The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change (Watts et al., 2021; Romanello et al., 2022) tracks the rapidly compounding health and mental-health impacts. Integrating mental health awareness into professional practice is not optional; it is an ethical imperative.
Several ethical frameworks guide this responsibility:
- Ethics of Care (Carol Gilligan, 1982): Emphasizes relational interdependence and moral obligation to care for those affected by environmental change.
- Common Good Framework: Prioritizes communal wellbeing over individual or corporate interests.
- Whole-of-Society Approach (UNDRR Sendai Framework, 2015): No single sector alone can address climate challenges. Engagement from government through grassroots organizations is essential.
- Systems Thinking (Peter Senge, 1990): Climate impacts ripple across multiple sectors, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration.
Sector-Specific Roles
Explore the sectors most relevant to your work:
Educators
Educators are essential in fostering climate literacy while addressing the emotional dimensions of climate change. Key strategies include integrating Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) with climate education — a meta-analysis by Durlak and colleagues (2011) found that universal school-based SEL programs significantly improve students' social-emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour, and academic performance — using age-appropriate approaches that honour developmental stages, and facilitating emotional expression through art, journaling, and group discussion. Trauma-informed practice in schools, as outlined by Chafouleas and colleagues (2016), provides a useful blueprint when working in communities affected by climate disasters.
Experiential and place-based learning — such as tree planting, water conservation projects, and local ecosystem exploration — fosters direct emotional connection. Encouraging student engagement in climate movements builds agency and counters helplessness.
Concrete examples:
- A grade-school teacher running a weekly climate-action club where students channel eco-anxiety into a schoolyard pollinator garden.
- A high-school counsellor pairing climate-literacy curriculum with structured reflection circles after extreme-weather events.
- A university professor publishing on climate grief in Gen Z and bringing it into seminars on environmental psychology.
- An outdoor educator organizing eco-therapy field trips that combine restoration work with reflective practice.
- A school district adopting a trauma-informed response plan for wildfire- or flood-affected communities.
Health and Social Care Providers
Health and social care providers are on the front lines of climate-related mental health challenges. Their role includes providing clinical interventions for climate distress (including eco-anxiety, trauma, and grief), integrating climate awareness into routine patient assessments, and delivering preventive care that builds resilience in vulnerable populations.
Adopting trauma-informed approaches for communities affected by climate disasters and bridging equity gaps by ensuring underserved populations have access to culturally responsive mental health support is critical.
Concrete examples:
- A family physician adding a brief climate-distress check-in to routine mental-health screening for adolescent patients.
- A social worker running group sessions for wildfire evacuees, integrating grief work and practical resettlement support.
- A nurse advocating for heatwave preparedness protocols in elder-care facilities and home-care services.
- A psychologist offering ACT-based therapy specifically for climate-related anxiety and grief.
- A hospital embedding mental-health protocols into its emergency-response plan for climate disasters.
- A community health worker connecting flood-displaced families to ongoing trauma-informed support, not just acute relief.
News and Media Professionals
The way climate stories are told shapes public emotional and behavioural responses. Media professionals have a responsibility to balance urgency with solutions — avoiding both complacency and paralysing doom narratives. Moser (2016) provides a foundational review of effective climate communication research and practice; solutions journalism offers one well-developed framework for moving beyond doom narratives.
Key practices include framing climate stories to include constructive possibilities and community action, highlighting diverse voices and local impacts, promoting media literacy to combat misinformation, and being mindful of the emotional impact of repeated crisis imagery on audiences.
Concrete examples:
- A reporter covering local climate recovery projects with explicit emotional framing — naming what residents feel, not just what was damaged.
- An editor offering trauma debriefs and peer support for journalists on disaster beats.
- A local newsroom adopting solutions-journalism principles when covering climate impacts in nearby communities.
- A producer giving sustained airtime to Indigenous and frontline voices rather than parachuting in only after disasters.
- A documentary filmmaker pairing distressing imagery with concrete community responses, so viewers leave with both honesty and a doorway to act.
Moral and Spiritual Leaders
Spiritual and faith communities provide essential spaces for connection, meaning-making, and emotional support. Major faith traditions have explicitly engaged the climate crisis — see, for example, Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si' (2015). Moral and spiritual leaders can validate climate emotions within a framework of stewardship and interdependence, conduct rituals that process collective grief and celebrate resilience, build community bonds that strengthen collective efficacy, and connect spiritual values to concrete climate action and justice work.
Their unique role lies in offering frameworks of meaning, hope, and purpose that sustain engagement over the long term.
Concrete examples:
- Indigenous elders leading healing ceremonies after land degradation or significant ecological loss.
- A faith leader weaving climate themes into regular services — naming grief, gratitude, and collective responsibility from the pulpit.
- An interfaith coalition launching a climate-compassion initiative that pairs ritual with community organizing.
- A meditation teacher offering free climate grief circles that combine contemplative practice with shared reflection.
- A chaplain integrating climate-related distress into their work with patients, students, or military families.
Policy and Decision-Makers
Policy and decision-makers have systemic-level responsibility for ensuring that mental health is integrated into climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. This includes creating legislative frameworks that embed mental health into climate policy, directing climate adaptation funding equitably to vulnerable and underserved communities, supporting grassroots participation in climate decision-making, and integrating mental health metrics into climate impact assessments.
Concrete examples:
- A municipal government launching a public campaign to destigmatize climate distress and signpost local supports.
- A provincial ministry funding mental-health surge capacity in regions affected by repeated wildfire seasons.
- A city council embedding mental-health metrics into its climate adaptation plan and reporting on them annually.
- A federal program funding Indigenous-led land stewardship that explicitly includes wellbeing and cultural-continuity outcomes.
- An MP or legislator championing just-transition legislation that pairs economic support with mental-health services for workers leaving high-emission industries.
Everyone Has a Role
The professional sectors above carry distinct responsibilities, but climate-mental health is not the exclusive territory of any one of them. Most of the support people receive when they're climate-distressed comes from non-professionals — from a friend who listens without rushing to fix, a parent who lets a child name their fear, a neighbour who checks in after the smoke clears. You do not need a clinical credential to make a meaningful difference. You need attention, willingness, and a few practical skills.
If you are not in one of the sectors above, your role might look like:
- Being the listener when someone in your life raises climate worries — without minimizing, debating, or rushing to solutions.
- Naming what you see — saying out loud "this is hard" rather than letting climate distress stay invisible.
- Modelling honest conversation with children, partners, friends, and colleagues, including when you don't have answers.
- Showing up locally — block parties, mutual aid, planting days, neighbourhood emergency planning.
- Choosing your information diet carefully and pointing others toward credible sources.
Sample Conversation Starters
If you want to support someone but aren't sure how to begin, the hardest part is often the opening line. Below are short, low-pressure starters you can borrow and adapt. Pick one that fits your relationship and the moment, rather than reaching for the perfect phrase.
Opening the Conversation
- "I noticed you got quiet when the wildfires came up at dinner. How are you doing about all that?"
- "I've been thinking about climate stuff a lot lately and feeling pretty heavy about it. Is that something you have space for, or no?"
- "I don't know if this is your thing, but I read something about climate grief this week and it made me think of how you talked about the lake. Want to tell me more about that?"
- "Can I check in with you about something, no agenda? How are you holding up with everything in the news?"
If Someone Brings It Up to You
- "Thank you for telling me. Tell me more — what's the hardest part right now?"
- "That makes sense. A lot of people are feeling something like that, even if they don't say it."
- "Do you want me to just listen, or would it help to think out loud about it together?"
- "I don't have answers for the big stuff. I can stay with you in this, though, if that helps."
Talking with Children and Adolescents
- "Have you been hearing about climate stuff at school? What have you been thinking?"
- "It makes sense to feel scared about this. I feel it too sometimes. Want to talk about what's going on for you?"
- "You don't have to fix this. Your job is to be a kid. The grown-ups are working on it — and you can too, if you want, in your own way."
- "What's something you love that you want to protect? Want to do one small thing for it together this week?"
Supporting Others Without Overstepping
One of the harder skills is being genuinely helpful without slipping into territory that isn't yours — fixing, advising, diagnosing, or pulling someone toward an action they aren't ready for. The goal is presence, not project-management. A few principles, drawn from peer-support traditions:
What Helps
- Ask what kind of support they want before offering it. "Do you want me to listen, problem-solve, or just sit with you?" is one of the most useful questions in any difficult conversation.
- Stay in your lane. You can witness a friend's grief without becoming their therapist. You can name distress in your team without diagnosing anyone. Bring care; leave clinical work to clinicians.
- Match your response to their pace, not yours. If you're in action mode and they're in grief, slow down. If they're moving toward action and you're skeptical, don't drag.
- Maintain confidentiality and choice. What someone shares with you in a vulnerable moment is theirs. Don't repeat it, even with good intentions.
- Know your own limits. You're allowed to say, "I care about this and I'm at my edge — let's continue tomorrow," or to refer someone to a professional resource if you sense they need more than you can offer.
What to Avoid
- Don't diagnose or label. "You sound depressed" or "that's eco-anxiety" can land as a verdict rather than a recognition. Describe what you observe instead: "you've seemed really weighed down this week."
- Don't reassure with platitudes. "It'll be fine," "humans always find a way," or "don't think about it too much" tend to shut conversations down rather than open them.
- Don't recruit them into your action. If they're in grief or paralysis, an invitation to "come to the protest with me" can feel like another demand. Offer it lightly, hold no expectation, and let it be a no.
- Don't outsource your own emotions to them. If you're flooded yourself, find your own support before trying to hold someone else's.
- Don't promise outcomes you can't deliver. "It'll get better" is not yours to promise. "I'll be here" usually is.
A useful one-line reminder: "presence over fix". Most of the time, the most healing thing you can offer is steady, witnessing presence — not a solution. Solutions, where they're appropriate, tend to emerge more easily once someone feels seen.
A Pocket Toolkit for Climate Conversations
The following short MHCCA guides are written for everyone, not just professionals. Open whichever one feels most relevant to a conversation you're already in or one you've been avoiding:
Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Indigenous knowledge systems offer culturally grounded, relational, and time-tested approaches to environmental stewardship and community wellbeing. As Whyte (2018) argues, Indigenous peoples already hold extensive knowledge of inhabiting climate disruption — their ancestors lived through, and named, the "ancestral dystopia" of colonial environmental violence. Any professional working at the intersection of climate and mental health should approach Indigenous knowledge with humility, recognizing the importance of cultural safety, reciprocity, and Indigenous leadership in shaping climate responses (Middleton et al., 2020). Decolonial approaches that honour Indigenous epistemologies are essential for equitable and effective climate-mental health work.
Climate Justice
Climate justice begins from a simple observation: those who have contributed least to the climate crisis are bearing the most of its harms. Wealthier nations and industries built the bulk of the emissions that drive warming; low-income communities, the Global South, Indigenous nations, racialized communities, and people with disabilities live with the bulk of the consequences (Schlosberg, 2007). Adequate responses to climate change cannot be separated from these inequities, and neither can the emotional and mental health impacts of the crisis. The case for a just transition connects worker, community, and ecological wellbeing within the same policy frame.
It is useful to think about climate justice through four overlapping lenses:
Who carries which burdens?
A fair sharing of climate burdens and benefits. Those who emitted the most should fund adaptation and mitigation in places that emitted the least. Distributive justice asks: who pays, who is protected, and who is left exposed?
Who has a voice in decisions?
Inclusive, meaningful participation in decision-making — not consultation as theatre. Policies should be co-created with the communities most affected, with real influence over outcomes, not imposed from above.
How is past harm repaired?
Acknowledging and repairing historical and ecological harms — colonial dispossession, environmental racism, ecosystem degradation. Restoration takes the form of land back, reparations, ecological repair, and revival of cultural practices.
How do oppressions stack?
Recognizing that race, gender, class, disability, age, and colonial history compound. Climate justice must address the way these systems interact — not isolate one identity at a time.
In practice, climate justice shows up as Indigenous-led land stewardship, just-transition policies for workers in high-emission industries, climate reparations between nations, participatory budgeting for adaptation, and grassroots movements that hold power accountable. The mental health relevance is direct: communities denied procedural and distributive justice consistently carry heavier emotional burdens. Climate-mental-health support that ignores justice tends to pathologize understandable responses to genuine harm. Support that integrates justice — by centring affected communities, taking historical harm seriously, and addressing structural conditions — tends to be both more effective and more honest.
Case Study Reflection
Case Study
A small coastal city is experiencing increasingly severe flooding. The community includes a mix of long-term residents, recent immigrants, Indigenous communities, and seasonal workers. Mental health services are limited, schools are struggling with rising student anxiety, local media coverage has been focused on property damage rather than human wellbeing, and faith communities are providing informal support but feel stretched thin. The city council is developing a new climate adaptation plan.
Consider this scenario from the perspective of your own professional sector. What is one concrete action you could take to support the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this community? How would you ensure that your approach is equitable and culturally responsive?
References — Module 5
Click any citation in the module to jump to the source. All links open in a new tab.
- Chafouleas, S. M., Johnson, A. H., Overstreet, S., & Santos, N. M. (2016). Toward a blueprint for trauma-informed service delivery in schools. School Mental Health, 8(1), 144–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-015-9166-8
- Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x
- Francis (Pope). (2015). Laudato si': On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
- Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674970960
- Middleton, J., Cunsolo, A., Jones-Bitton, A., Wright, C. J., & Harper, S. L. (2020). Indigenous mental health in a changing climate: A systematic scoping review of the global literature. Environmental Research Letters, 15(5), 053001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab68a9
- Moser, S. C. (2016). Reflections on climate change communication research and practice in the second decade of the 21st century: What more is there to say? WIREs Climate Change, 7(3), 345–369. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.403
- Romanello, M., Di Napoli, C., Drummond, P., et al. (2022). The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: Health at the mercy of fossil fuels. The Lancet, 400(10363), 1619–1654. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01540-9
- Schlosberg, D. (2007). Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286294.001.0001
- Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday/Currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Discipline
- UNDRR. (2015). Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. https://www.undrr.org/publication/sendai-framework-disaster-risk-reduction-2015-2030
- Watts, N., Amann, M., Arnell, N., et al. (2021). The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: Responding to converging crises. The Lancet, 397(10269), 129–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32290-X
- Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), 224–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618777621
Closing Reflection
You may not work in education, healthcare, media, spiritual leadership, or policy — but you do hold roles. What is one role you carry (parent, friend, neighbour, colleague, community member, or a sector role above) where someone could benefit from climate-emotional support, and what is one concrete next step you could take in that role?
Your response is private — submitting completes the module's reflection requirement.
Key Takeaways
- Professionals across all sectors have an ethical duty to address climate-related mental health impacts.
- Each sector — education, health, media, spiritual leadership, and policy — has unique leverage points for supporting climate-mental health.
- Climate-mental health support is not the exclusive territory of professionals — friends, family members, and neighbours often provide the most consistent and meaningful support.
- Indigenous knowledge systems and climate justice frameworks are essential for equitable, culturally responsive approaches.
- A whole-of-society approach, with cross-sector collaboration, is needed to address climate-mental health comprehensively.
1. The whole-of-society approach to climate-mental health means:
2. Which is a key strategy for educators?
3. Climate justice recognizes that:
4. Why is cultural safety important when engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems?
✦ Submit both reflections and pass the knowledge check to continue
Transcript — slide 1
Closing reflection & final assessment
Submit your closing reflection, then complete the 23-question final assessment to earn your certificate.
Course Summary
Congratulations on reaching the final module. Over the course of this programme, you have:
- Explored the relationship between climate change and emotional wellbeing, including the planetary health framework and Indigenous relational perspectives.
- Learned about the spectrum of climate emotions — worry, anxiety, grief, solastalgia, guilt, shame, anger, isolation, denial, ecoparalysis, and hope — and why they are meaningful rather than pathological.
- Examined how social, environmental, developmental, and intersectional factors shape climate emotional responses.
- Developed an understanding of adaptive coping strategies, including problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-focused approaches, as well as practical skills for resilience.
- Considered the ethical responsibilities and sector-specific roles of professionals in supporting climate-mental health.
As you return to your work and your community, we invite you to carry this knowledge forward. Individual actions may not magically erase the impacts of climate change, but the collective work of informed, compassionate professionals across every sector can reduce harm and kindle hope. Together, our collective efforts truly can make a difference.
Closing Reflection & Commitment
Please respond to all three prompts before continuing to the final assessment:
- One shift: What is one thing you have learned that has shifted your understanding of climate emotions?
- One next step: What is one concrete step you will take in your professional or personal life to apply what you have learned?
- One step this week: Complete this sentence — "One step I will take this week is…" Keep it small, specific, and doable. Examples: "I will text my sister and ask how she is doing about climate change," "I will attend the climate café at the library on Thursday," "I will set a 20-minute daily cap on climate news," "I will start a check-in with my team about climate at the next Monday meeting."
Your response is private — submitting unlocks the final assessment below.
Final Knowledge Assessment
Complete the following 23-question assessment. A score of 100% (23 out of 23) is required to earn your certificate. The final three questions are scenario-based and ask you to apply what you've learned. You may retake as many times as needed.
1. Climate change is primarily driven by:
2. The planetary health framework emphasizes that:
3. This course focuses on emotions rather than clinical diagnoses because:
4. Solastalgia is best defined as:
5. Which of the following is true about climate denial?
6. The biopsychosocial model explains that climate emotions are shaped by:
7. Intersectionality in the climate context means:
8. An adaptive response to climate distress is one that:
9. Problem-focused coping involves:
10. Active Hope, as described by Joanna Macy, involves:
11. Why is validation of climate emotions considered important?
12. Which is NOT an evidence-based resilience strategy discussed in this course?
13. The Ethics of Care framework emphasizes:
14. A whole-of-society approach to climate-mental health means:
15. Which professional strategy is recommended for educators?
16. Media professionals can support climate-mental health by:
17. From many Indigenous perspectives, climate change represents:
18. Climate justice recognizes that:
19. Ecoparalysis is best understood as:
20. Scenario: A friend tells you, "I just can't think about climate change anymore — I shut down whenever it comes up." Based on what you've learned, which response is most likely to keep the door open?
21. Scenario: A teenager you support says she feels overwhelmed by climate news but also guilty when she takes a break from it. Which response best applies the course's framework?
22. Scenario: You are a primary-care provider. A patient who survived a recent flood reports nightmares, hypervigilance when it rains, and avoiding driving past the affected neighbourhood. Based on the course, what is the most appropriate next step?
23. Which statement best summarizes the core message of this course?
✦ Submit the closing reflection above before submitting the assessment
Certificate of Completion
This certifies that
has successfully completed
Understanding Climate Emotions:
A Professional Development Course
A two-hour online course offered by the
Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance (MHCCA)
Date of Completion:
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