Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

A climate cafe is a hospitable and empathic space where anxiety about the current crisis can be safely expressed and people can engage with difficult truths while staying connected and grounded. With emotionally containing structures in place, climate cafes allow participants to explore anger, helplessness, sadness, grief and depression without dissociating, numbing or going into blind panic, offering relief and a powerful sense of connection.

With the effects of the climate emergency increasingly shaping our daily lives, feelings of ecological distress – particularly ecogrief and anxiety – have become palpable. In this article, we focus on these affective responses and examine how creative practice collaborations are curating possibilities for hope and resilience. We argue for the importance of such creative engagement, as ecological distress can lead to paralysis, nihilism, or despair, making it imperative to explore how creative practices open pathways for collective healing and actionable hope in the face of crisis.

We are at such a pivotal moment in human existence that you cannot separate the holistic context of climate breakdown and the loss of human habitat from the psychotherapeutic treatment of anyone remotely aware of the climate emergency. What it means to be human and our relationship with other life is changing.

In a recent article on climate change and recognition of the need for adaptation, Dannevig and Hovelsrud (Clim Chang 135:261–275, 2016) conclude that climate change is not salient in fisheries on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. This commentary scrutinizes this conclusion. Empirical findings rather indicate that the Lofoten fishers do indeed frame climate change as a problem and acknowledge the need for adaptive response; however, mental barriers are likely to mask existing climate change salience. Based on the authors’ line of argument and insights from psychology, this contribution aims to extend their debate and stimulate discussion by drawing attention to the impacts of mental barriers. A particular focus is thereby laid on the role of cognitive dissonance and hard-wired emotions.

We have reached a point where it is impossible to ignore climate change and its impacts - but this does not necessarily imply people are ready to act. As recent research shows, even when people are well-informed about climate change, appraise it as a current, visible, local and personal threat and express concern, their response in terms of facing challenges head on and translating their concern into climate-mitigative, adaptive and transformative behaviour seems restricted.How does this knowledge-action gap arise? Also, it is striking that people who initially state that they do not worry about climate change, later seemingly contradict themselves by saying the opposite: "I am extremely worried." Why is that?

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near term social collapse due to climate change. The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic journals and publications direct from research institutes. That synthesis leads to a conclusion there will be a near term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers. The paper reviews some of the reasons why collapse-denial may exist, in particular, in the professions of sustainability research and practice, therefore leading to these arguments having been absent from these fields until now. The paper offers a new meta-framing of the implications for research, organisational practice, personal development and public policy, called the Deep Adaptation Agenda. Its key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restorations are explained.

This paper presents a review of psychology research that can help people begin to assess the different ways they can responsibly support each other to talk about their thoughts and feelings on their perceptions of societal disruption and collapse, at home and abroad, due to environmental and climate change. It includes a summary of a review of published studies in psychology on matters of anticipating difficult futures, including vulnerability, disruption, disaster, suffering and mortality. The claims by both specialists and non-specialists that collapse anticipation is necessarily harmful to mental health and social engagement is shown to be theoretically and empirically weak. Instead, the research that suggests we engage each other on this upsetting topic to promote coping.

Psychoanalytical perspectives on our responses to climate change and environmental destruction may be said to have begun with Harold Searles in 1972 and have gathered pace in recent years. All these explorations have in common a reliance on a set of conceptual ideas that were initially developed by Sandor Ferenczi, although he is rarely credited. Fully acknowledging of the extent of environmental destruction and climate change is seen as traumatic in these writings, and therefore, concepts that have been developed in working with patients traumatized by abuse have been found essential in trying to understand and describe our responses. This paper will show how Ferenczi's thinking about trauma and about the therapeutic relationship has influenced recent suggestions as to how a psychoanalytical perspective may help us to explore attitudes and beliefs and help others to fully acknowledge the seriousness of climate change and so change damaging behaviors.

Climate change is no longer a hypothetical argument but a reality that threatens the existence of human and other-than-human life on the planet. With that information in mind, can we afford to keep practising psychotherapy with a focus on the individual and their personal needs, or do we need to radically question the role of psychotherapy in its lack of relationship to the more-than-human world?