Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

A toolkit for young people coping with eco-distress, produced by Klara Wrusch during her CPA internship. Covers the range of eco-emotions, the importance of supportive groups, three dimensions of coping (action, distancing and grieving), and reflective and journalling activities for teenagers and young adults.

A single-page comic/cartoon by Emily Kelsall (Canada), responding to the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion (TMX). This is a visual piece rather than a text - view the cartoon itself via the link rather than relying on a written summary.

In this interview with Charles Ogunbode, psychotherapeutic counsellor Yasmin Kapadia discusses how eco-anxiety manifests differently across communities and social groups, arguing that a genuinely global response to the climate crisis cannot ignore differences in responsibility and impact between people. Kapadia reflects on her own experience of eco-anxiety leading her to join the Climate Psychology Alliance, and discusses how ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the UK environmental sector despite disproportionate exposure to climate harms such as air pollution. She argues that some communities with long histories of navigating existential crisis may express climate concern differently to dominant narratives of panic, and that these narratives need space and amplification within the environmental movement rather than being drowned out by more visible, privileged voices.

This chapter offers a personal, first-person testimony from a climate scientist and activist on the experience of facing the scientific reality of climate breakdown directly, and what it demands of those who do so, both emotionally and in terms of how they choose to live and act.

The Work that Reconnects (TWTR) is an experiential group methodology that has engaged hundreds of thousands of people worldwide over 40 years, integrating psychological and philosophical responses to distress about the world situation. This chapter outlines the central spiral framework - gratitude, honouring pain for the world, seeing with new and ancient eyes, and going forth into committed action - exploring its application as personal practice, mutual support, peer-led groups and transformative groupwork, alongside links to psychotherapeutic models and supporting evidence.

A guide and resource for exploring climate emotions with younger children and people who express themselves in non-verbal ways.

Free-to-download e-book aimed at parents and carers, supporting children with climate emotions without overwhelming them. Available via mailing list.

Blog by climate scientist J. K. Steinberger reflecting on the psychological toll of the climate crisis on children and young people.

This article draws on both psychoanalysis and social theory to deepen our understanding of ressentiment — the complex of feelings revolving around suppressed grievance first identified by Nietzsche and Scheler. In highlighting important differences between authoritarian and totalitarian states of mind, it situates the recent return of the former in the context of the deepening climate crisis and the end of the Holocene. Modernity's foundational belief in progress is periodically shaken by crises for which there seem to be no obvious solution; in such times of profound uncertainty, society may be subject to a veritable plague of toxic feelings and fantasies that fuel various forms of political reaction. The paper connects psychoanalytic analyses of grievance and the 'nursing' of ressentiment with contemporary climate denial and reactionary politics, arguing that the inability to mourn underlies both.