Tag Archive for: climate psychology

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Understanding Climate Anxiety | Professor Geoff Beattie

 

Understanding Climate Anxiety describes climate anxiety as a new type of anxiety shaped by the modern world and ‘the high carbon economies and industries that have flourished since the industrial revolution’.

Professor Beattie says the scepticism and hostility targeted at people with climate change anxiety is similar in some respects to that initially shown towards traumatised troops in WWI. He states that it is a chronic form of psychological distress that does not fit neatly with other clinically recognised forms of anxiety, whilst noting that pathologizing what is a rational response to scientific data might not actually be helpful.

He argues that in order to tackle valid climate anxiety people need to feel that they have agency to change the future of the Earth in a positive way through individual, societal and political actions.

Reducing climate anxiety, and helping people deal more effectively with their negative emotions regarding climate change, is a pressing issue for us all. We need people to overcome their feelings of helplessness through this disinhibition of thoughts and feelings, and understand that positive action and change is possible.

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What We Think About…Global Warming | Per Espen Stoknes

As evidence of global warming continues to mount, resistance to addressing it often grows just as quickly, making it increasingly difficult to cut emissions and prepare for inevitable climate impacts. This paradox, explains psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes in What We Think about When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, stems from a poor grasp of how people actually think and behave.

Drawing on examples from business and government, Stoknes identifies five key psychological barriers that hinder climate action. More importantly, he provides five strategies designed to overcome them by aligning with human nature instead of fighting it. These strategies emphasize social connections, positivity, and simplicity, making sustainable choices more natural and accessible. They also highlight the power of storytelling to create shared meaning and community, while using signals and feedback to reinforce progress.

Stoknes’s approach transforms obstacles into opportunities, showing how collective and personal change can emerge from reimagining how we talk about—and act on—climate change.

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Climate, Psychology and Change | Steffi Bednarek

With so many immediate and intensifying crises unfolding around us, how can therapists adapt to promote healing and growth? Climate psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek’s response, in the form of this collection of essays by Francis Weller, Bayo Akomolafe, Hāweatea Holly Bryson, and others, attempts to answer this urgent question.
While Western psychotherapy views our practice as a way to bring clients back to baseline “normal,” Bednarek argues that our society’s “normal” is profoundly unwell, and that our lives reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and ultimately extract our humanity. Which means that finding healing and purpose in uncertain times entails altering not just the way therapy is done, but the way we think about mental health.

Holistic and intersectional, this collection reckons with the ways power, colonialism, and capitalism impact our myriad crises—while shaping Western psychology as we know it.

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The Future We Choose | Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

 

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac know the climate crisis from inside the machine. As the UN’s Executive Secretary and Chief Political Strategist during the Paris Agreement, they helped broker the closest thing we have to a planetary lifeline. Their book emerges from that crucible, insisting that what they call “stubborn optimism” must win over the narcotic of ecological despair. It is less a cheerleading manual than a clear-eyed reckoning with two futures: one hellish, the other hard-won.

We know the hellish version: a 2050 in which we failed to act. The air is toxic, seas change the shape of coastlines, cities become deserts, and forced migrations sweep across the globe. The imagery is suffocating, and deliberately so. It echoes the fatalism that dominates much climate storytelling today—a genre of doom that anaesthetises as much as it warns.

But then comes the counter-vision: a 2050 where humanity took itself in hand. The air is fresh, cities buzz with life and greenery, and economies thrive on renewable abundance. Transition was difficult, but liberating: it’s not utopia, but it is survivable, and charged with possibility.

The strength of the book lies in this friction between terror and hope. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac don’t try to ignore the abyss. Instead they argue that optimism is not naïveté but strategy: the sober, disciplined choice to believe that change is possible, to acknowledge that positive that shifts are already underway – and that history turns on the will of small, committed groups. The Future We Choose doesn’t let its readers off the hook, but —it dares you to step into the future with open eyes, in the knowledge that despair is a luxury we can no longer afford.