Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

A collection of essays on climate change and cultural transformation, drawing on psychotherapy, Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, and the history of ideas. The title essay, 'Everything and Nothing: Radical Hope in a Time of Climate Change' (originally a CPA paper), considers Jonathan Lear's concept of radical hope alongside Buddhist teachings on emptiness, asking whether contemplative practice can support engagement with the climate crisis without collapsing into denial or despair.

Though not a climate-focused study, this widely-cited experimental psychology paper investigates how incidental experiences of anxiety shape perspective-taking, finding that anxious participants show greater egocentrism in mental-state reasoning than those experiencing other negative emotions such as anger or disgust, or neutral states. Anxious participants were more likely to rely on their own spatial and conceptual perspective when reasoning about others, an effect explained in part by heightened uncertainty appraisal. Retained in this library as a relevant theoretical reference point: the finding that anxiety specifically (rather than negative affect generally) narrows perspective-taking capacity has direct relevance for understanding how climate anxiety might affect empathy, intergenerational understanding, and collective action, even though the original study does not address climate change directly.

Free-to-download book developed by Thought Box, supporting teachers to meet children and young people's emotional needs while educating them about the climate crisis.

Podcast episode discussing the Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators and the emotional, political, personal and pedagogical challenges teachers face in the context of climate change.

From Psyche Guides: While anxiety about the climate crisis can be rational and even adaptive for most people, sometimes it can become pervasive and incapacitating. This burdensome form of climate anxiety can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, causing intense suffering and potentially even deterring one from taking action in pursuit of climate solutions (what some have called 'eco-paralysis'). Structural change is the real solution for climate anxiety, but as people work together to achieve that, we can also focus on building emotional resilience. Strategies include getting a better understanding of what you're feeling, calming your body when it's in a state of alarm, tackling unhelpful thoughts and media usage, seeking safe spaces to explore feelings, and taking collective action and building community.

Article and podcast episode with advice from senior psychologist Susie Burke on talking to children about climate change.

This invited paper for the 40th anniversary of Political Geography coins the concept of 'climate coloniality' to name how the extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the crisis in radically different ways. Sultana argues that coloniality seeps through everyday life across space and time, curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossession, and climate debts, and that decolonising climate requires addressing both epistemic violence and material outcomes rather than treating the crisis as a politically neutral, purely technical problem. The paper argues that genuinely decolonising climate action must engage with the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and geopolitics embedded in existing global governance structures, discursive framings, and proposed solutions.

As scientists call for widespread climate action, this book responds to an alarming rise in climate doomism - the belief that it is too late to do anything about climate change, which leads many people to look away and do nothing, immobilised by defeatist thinking. Drawing from climate science, sociology, psychology and philosophy, Stuart argues that every fraction of a degree of warming avoided means saving lives and livelihoods, and outlines reasons to choose action grounded in active hope instead. The book examines specific policy proposals for effectively limiting global warming, the psychology of motivating climate action and collective action, and closes by outlining a positive vision of the far-reaching social and economic changes needed to forge a better path for people and the planet.

This influential paper formalises the concept of the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which humans and human societies have become a global geophysical force comparable to natural forces that have shaped Earth's history. The authors trace the Anthropocene's origins to around 1800 with the onset of industrialisation and the massive expansion in fossil fuel use, using atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as a simple tracking indicator, and describe the 'Great Acceleration' since 1950 during which human activity and its consequences for Earth system functioning have intensified dramatically. Now one of the most widely cited papers in climate and environmental science, it provides a foundational scientific frame that much subsequent climate psychology literature builds on or responds to.