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We exist because the climate crisis isn't only an environmental emergency. It's a human one. And the work of facing it, individually and together, asks something of us that politics, policy, and technical solutions alone can't provide. This page is where you can learn who we are, where we came from, what we believe, and how we work.
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Climate psychology explores current existential anxiety and its associated defences, the ways old beliefs can be relinquished, and the ways we can open up to new ones.
Climate psychology is concerned with the emotions, relationships, and mental processes that have contributed to the ecological and climate crisis, and with our responses and adaptations to it.
It draws on psychotherapy, psychosocial studies, the arts, spiritual and philosophical thought, literature, systems thinking, and ecopsychology, all in the service of unpicking our collective and individual responses to the crisis, much of which is unacknowledged and unconscious.
It aims to build understanding and support for individuals and groups, enable transformation and adaptation, and help us cope with the consequences of what is already happening. It imagines new ways of practising, forms of support, and ways of living and being-with that can help communities survive and thrive.
For a fuller introduction to the field, read the Climate Psychology Handbook, CPA's foundational guide, free to download.
CPA's origins go back to a conference called "Facing Climate Change" held at the University of the West of England's Centre for Psycho-Social Studies in March 2009. The conference was conceived and chaired by Adrian Tait, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and brought together speakers including Paul Hoggett, Mary-Jayne Rust, Judith Anderson, and George Marshall.
It was the beginning of something.
Between 2009 and 2012, with Adrian Tait and Paul Hoggett as co-founding Secretary and Chair and the hard work of a whole group of founding members, the Climate Psychology Alliance came into being. From a handful of practitioners and researchers asking whether there was a place for psychological thinking in the climate conversation, CPA has grown into a community of around 500 members, more interdisciplinary, more international, and more central to the field than anyone could have predicted.
Today, CPA is a Charitable Community Benefit Society, co-owned by its members, governed democratically, and working for public and community benefit. We're UK-based, but our work reaches internationally. Over the years, some CPA members have played a role in the founding of sister organisations elsewhere, including Climate Psychology Alliance of North America (CPA-NA), and we now maintain partnerships and dialogues across several continents. Within the UK, place-based groups have emerged, like CPA Scotland and regional circles in Cambridge, Liverpool, and elsewhere, bringing climate psychology into local contexts.
CPA's work is grounded in five interconnected principles. Each one shapes how we hold space, run events, do research, train practitioners, and respond to what members bring us.
We take feelings seriously. Grief, fear, rage, love, numbness, shame, hope, all of it. The climate crisis is an emotional crisis, and the exclusion of the psychological dimension from the climate conversation is a myopia that costs us dearly. Our work begins by making space for what people actually feel, without flinching.
We believe humans are made in relation to each other, to other species, and to the living world. The climate crisis is, at its root, a crisis of disconnection. Our work draws on relational approaches to therapy, community-building, and collective response, because the way forward is together.
Climate psychology has to reckon with who has been harmed, who has been heard, and whose futures are being protected. Racism, colonialism, and extraction sit at the heart of the crisis, and our work is to support people to face these difficult truths. Justice isn't an add-on. It's a starting point.
We recognise that the climate crisis triggers and compounds existing traumas, personal, intergenerational, and collective. Our work is informed by trauma theory and practice, and we hold our spaces with the care that trauma-awareness requires.
We understand individuals, communities, and the more-than-human world as interwoven. Climate psychology sits at the intersection of ecology, psychology, and social thought, drawing on depth psychology, psychosocial studies, deep ecology, and systems thinking. We don't see the personal and the political as separate.
Central to CPA: honesty, trust, care, respect, solidarity, community, and vulnerability.
We actively engage in the struggle for equality and against discrimination. Solidarity means showing up for each other and for those most affected by the crisis, not just speaking about it.
We are co-owned, member-led, and community-oriented. Individual expertise matters, but the real work happens in groups, in relationships, in the slow building of shared understanding.
We believe vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness. This work asks us to stay open to what is hard, and to let ourselves be changed by it.
We are committed to facing difficult truths, both about the climate and ecological crisis and about ourselves. We don't look away, and we don't offer false reassurance.
We trust each other to bring our whole selves to this work, including our doubts, fears, and uncertainties. Trust is what makes the deeper conversations possible.
We operate from a culture of care, for ourselves, for each other, and for the living world. Care is not a soft extra. It is the work.
CPA is interdisciplinary and intergenerational. We come from different professional backgrounds, traditions, and life experiences, and we value what difference brings to the work.
The climate crisis is not a standalone event. It's inseparable from the histories of racism, colonialism, and extraction that shaped the world we live in. Facing that honestly is part of the work.
At CPA, justice isn't a separate pillar or a line in a values statement. It's woven through everything we do, from the spaces we hold to the conversations we have with ourselves, and from the research we publish to the way we train practitioners. We believe climate psychology has to reckon with who has been harmed, who has been heard, and whose futures are being protected.
Within CPA, this takes many forms. A dedicated working group explores racialisation and decolonisation, holding reflective spaces and developing awareness. Our Group for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour meets monthly as an affinity space and works on in-reach and outreach projects. Our decolonising and antiracism group partners with the Board to organise workshops that deepen the whole membership's engagement with these questions. And across our events, trainings, and publications, we work to centre voices that have been too often excluded.
This work is slow and often uncomfortable. We are not arriving anywhere. We are committing to the ongoing practice of showing up, learning, unlearning, and holding each other accountable. It is central to climate psychology as we understand it.
A five-year National Lottery-funded initiative, iCRA is a partnership between CPA, the Mindfulness Initiative, and the Climate Majority Project. Together, we're building the first UK-wide community of practice linking inner work with climate action and community adaptation. iCRA brings together practitioners across contemplative, therapeutic, and activist traditions to develop and share approaches for inner climate response.
CPA has been part of the National Emergency Briefing (NEB) on the climate and nature crisis, which brings together leading UK experts to deliver unfiltered assessments of the threats facing food supply, public health, and national security. Our involvement reflects CPA's commitment to bringing psychological insight into the spaces where climate decisions are made.
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CPA's flagship bi-annual journal, Explorations in Climate Psychology, is produced by an editorial working group of members. It tracks the pace, rhythms, and voices of climate psychology as the field emerges, and welcomes contributions from practitioners, researchers, artists, and activists worldwide.
CPA continues to develop new partnerships and projects. This section will grow as we add details of current collaborations and document the outcomes of our work with other organisations.
The CCLC training is held by a small, experienced team who lead CPA's wider Climate Café Listening Circle programme.
The National Lottery Community Fund (through iCRA)
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global (youth and parent programmes)
The Mindfulness Initiative (iCRA partnership)
The Climate Majority Project (iCRA partnership)
