Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

From The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist (Willsher & Freeston, 2024): Climate change distress is a challenge to people seeking help, and to those providing help. Those providing help are working in a new area of clinical practice where little is known, but they may also be experiencing climate change distress. The aim of this article is to highlight the personal and professional implications of the unfolding climate crisis and how we might better understand and support those with understandable, yet intense, emotional reactions to the climate crisis. The article consists of a first-person narrative by Claire Willsher, a CBT psychotherapist with lived experience of climate anxiety, and a commentary on the narrative based on the psychology of climate change literature by Mark Freeston.

ABSTRACT (Open access, PMC): Climate distress in young people is very likely to increase in coming years, and young people's mental health services need to be prepared to meet the demand. This paper reports a qualitative pilot study to establish the views of three stakeholder groups involved in youth mental health counselling services in England: young people, mental health counsellors, and strategic partners. They find broad agreement amongst youth mental health service users and providers that climate distress comprises a range of emotional responses to climate change, including anxiety, hopelessness, isolation, guilt and injustice, exacerbated by developmental, social and informational contexts. Service providers can support young people by surfacing, validating, and channelling these emotional responses, but they themselves need training and support to do this effectively.

ABSTRACT (open access via Cardiff ORCA repository): Climate distress describes a complex array of emotional responses to climate change, which may include anxiety, despair, anger and grief. This paper presents a conceptual analysis of how acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is relevant to supporting those with climate distress. ACT aims to increase psychological flexibility, consisting of an open and aware orientation to one's experiences, and an engaged approach to living, guided by personal values. By embracing climate distress as a natural human experience and promoting value-guided action, ACT offers a promising approach that brings co-benefits to individuals and wider society.

Whyte names and maps an emerging field he provisionally calls 'Indigenous climate change studies', encompassing the work of Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists and leaders supporting Indigenous peoples' capacities to address climate change. The essay surveys Indigenous climate resiliency plans, policy documents, declarations and academic scholarship, arguing that climate change cannot be understood as a purely 'natural' phenomenon but must be situated within processes of extraction, dispossession and settlement that Indigenous communities have long resisted and theorised. Whyte frames Indigenous futurity and decolonisation as central, rather than peripheral, to understanding and responding to the climate crisis, offering a foundational orientation for the wider field.

Art therapy, ecological grief, mourning and climate loss; explores creative practice as a pathway for ecological grieving.

From the PhD thesis abstract (Westcott, University of the West of England, 2016): This study examines the question of whether subjective attitudes to climate change play a significant part in the determination of local authorities' policy and actions on climate change mitigation; whether the personal views of council members and officers about climate change, their beliefs, fears and attitudes affect the outcomes in terms of policy and action, or whether organizational culture, norms and collectively policed limits to discourse have this effect; or whether the influence of central government policy is so overwhelming that action and policy is determined almost wholly by external and objective influences. Interviews with officers and members of local authorities in the South West of England identify that considerable reductions in council carbon emissions are possible when subjective factors align with organisational will.