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Climate Courage Campaign

Anxiety, denial, depression are sensible responses to learning the truth about climate – leaving millions of young people overwhelmed and teachers unfairly burdened. Join the call for access to resources and support to properly address our climate anxiety crisis – starting in the classroom.

What's Happening?

In classrooms across the world, educators find that learning about the realities of environmental breakdown brings anxiety, depression and overwhelm for their students. Don’t call it doomism: this is a natural response to a grave threat properly understood – especially when the world’s leaders are so clearly failing to protect young people and their future.

Currently schools and other places of education for children and adults alike are without the resources to properly handle naturally arising climate anxiety, and support healthy engagement with the realities of a warming planet. 

 

Meanwhile at a global level, a vicious circle has set in where public and institutional anxiety deepens inaction and lack of action deepens our many crises. 

 

As knowledge of the climate and other crises grows ever more widespread, mental health impacts must be handled with care and sensitivity – for the sake of societal wellbeing and to nurture the wise and decisive public action that can only come from healthy engagement with reality.

 

As the first phase of our climate anxiety campaign gets underway, we’re highlighting the need for appropriate resources and supportive spaces to help the millions of young people whose lives are unavoidably impacted by climate anxiety. 

 

Amazing work is already underway to create the inner resource we need – and it’s time for this capacity to become available to as many people as possible – starting in the classroom.

We warmly invite you to join us. Help kickstart a national conversation about climate anxiety by signing our open letter today, and join a growing coalition including Bill McKibben, Charlie Gardener, Renee Leertzmann and many more.

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Curated resources

Climate scientists and educators find that distress, anxiety, denial and even depression are natural responses to learning the truth about climate change and environmental breakdown. The CMP emphasises the need to tell the truth while acknowledging the help needed to handle its impacts for educators and their students.The resources included here are intended to help address taboos connected to climate distress and create a more complete education around the climate and ecological crises. They are all freely available and accessible.

 

We prioritise resources that take a systemic / holistic view, and align with our campaign strategy to support system change. Rather than pathologising or attempting to ‘fix’ anxiety, we argue that a proactive systemic approach is both desirable and likely far more efficient given the sheer numbers of young people involved. We wish to avoid providing coping mechanisms at the expense of real, climate-relevant responses that can help students to lean into all feelings and channel their energy into  climate-positive action. Schools can make a major difference to the onset and impacts of climate anxiety and other difficult feelings and it’s likely that a preventative, whole-school approach would be most impactful.  

 

We’ve identified four core areas of support that are essential for all educational settings, with an additional area dedicated to higher and further education. It’s worth noting that while we organise these categories separately for ease of access, modes of support are interdependent and some activities cross over.

 

In  time we hope to provide an indexed, searchable database with a wider range of resources.

A significant factor in young people’s climate distress is a sense of abandonment arising from perceived failure of ‘the adults’ in safeguarding their future (e.g. Hickman et al., 2021). Students need to see that adults are taking the climate crisis seriously through realistic adaptation measures and mitigation. This is the foundation of meeting essential needs and safeguarding from which other work can build. 

 

Both students and educators need reliable ways to work with their own feelings. Children furthermore benefit from feeling confident that their educators are themselves supported and equipped to hold space for their concerns.

Adults

  • Cadence Round Table  Professional network offering peer support and consultancy for workplaces – free events and workshops 
  • Climate psychology alliance – Climate Cafes – online ‘held’ spaces to share difficult feelings around climate change. 
  • CitiesRise: a Horizon-funded project being delivered in Chennai, Nairobi, Cape Town and Stockholm. It investigates the wellbeing outcomes of mindfulness-based school interventions that strengths gratitude, kindness, hope through the creative arts.
  • Good Grief Network – 10 step networks 10 steps to resilience and empowerment in a chaotic climate – workshops for social and emotional support. ‘Helps individuals process their overwhelming feelings, deconstruct and reimagine cultural narratives, build community, and reinvest their energies into meaningful efforts’. 
  • ClimatEdPsych Working with ecoemotions: A guide for educators guidance on practical tips to regulate the nervous system and build healthy habits to reduce feelings of anxiety around climate. Workshops and training for teachers and children are also offered.
  • ClimatEdPsych  Relational Resilience to climate change: A guide for educators guidance on the importance of strong attachments when supporting children with ecoemotions.
  • Australian psychological society – Climate change empowerment handbook a guide that uses the acronym ACTIVATE and insights from psychological science to help adults move through feelings, look at their own behaviour, engage and take action.
  • Climate Psychology Alliance for the Schools Climate Summit, London Climate Action Week –  Guidance on effective climate change communication with children; a guide to the psychology of children’s responses and how this can show up in conversations with adults. Helpful emotional regulation tools.
  • ClimatEdPsych Managing ecoemotions: A guide for educators guidance on practical tips to regulate the nervous system and build healthy habits to reduce feelings of anxiety around climate. Workshops and training for teachers and children are also offered.
  • Active Hope offer free online course for adults – based on the book Active Hope and ’The Great Turning Times’

 Supporting Students

Educators and students need to feel that they are equipped to handle challenges in the world, with information, relevant teachings and skills. Otherwise, a sense of powerlessness and lack of hope can exacerbate distress.

  • Teach The Future – a youth-led campaign to transform the curriculum  around the climate emergency and ecological crisis.
  • Force of Nature – workshops for young people to empower action.
  • CAPE – Climate Adapted Pathways for Education – guidance on whole school transformation, with a focus on change implementation that respects the needs of individual schools.
  • Muinincatalyst curriculum development – free for schools to sign up to resources (future focus for 21st century group)
  • Bertha Foundation Youth centred environmental organisation working with YP 11 – 18 seeking to grow environmental leaders, storytellers and change makers – already working with 13 London schools – Y7 programme and aiming to implement whole school change – fully funded
  • Eco Action Families Guide for talking to children and a Film and film guide for secondary schools
  • Transform our World – educator networks, resources and events (e.g. climate youth commit) to help young people engage in action.
  • Internet Matters – guide on how to help kids spot fake news and misinformation, and  find the fake games and quizzes for kids by age. 
  • ClimatEdPsych – The Psychology of climate change engagement: A guide for educators A guide that considers how to educate young people about internet misinformation, the reasons why people have been slow to act and how to avoid burnout.
  • Global Justice Now – The Case for Climate Justice. A free flip book and leaflet clearly laying out the historical roots of climate impact inequalities.
  • Climate Change Education Exchange – collection of resources and links on environmental justice
  • Harvard University, ProjectZero ‘thinking routines’ set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking.
  • Urbanwise London – Children’s Environmental Parliament – example of London-based speaking event that gives pupils a voice on environmental issues.
  • Friends of the Earth – Climate Justice, Hope and Action – a set of KS3 lesson plans and resources on the roots of climate and biodiversity crisis, solutions, climate justice, and  ecoanxiety 
  • ThoughtBox Education – the Changing Climates Curriculum – a set of 4 KS2 lesson plans and resources on that focus on emotions and practise skills of critical thinking & questioning, deep listening, empathy building and thinking in systems in relation to climate. Additional age range sets available through sign up with ThoughtBox.
  • Climate Museum UK Collection of extreme weather stories – could be useful for curriculum discussions with older young people
  • Our Youth for the Climate (OY4C) has built the first ever climate-oriented curriculum created by young people for young people. It provides students with introductory climate knowledge, covering both scientific principles and the often neglected social dimensions of the climate crisis. 

Education should foster a foundational sense of belonging, social support and nourishing connection to nature. This understanding of interdependency is also a fundamental aspect of societal transition to sustainability and climate-positive action. 

Many of the above resources are relevant to all ages and stages of education. However, recognising the intensity and fuller immersion of higher levels of climate science studies, the following are aimed specifically at those in more advanced education. At this stage students may not have experienced adequate support of the kind outlined above and the existential threat of climate change at this age can have a serious impact on mental health. 

  • Climate Cares – a team of researchers, designers, policy experts and educators at Imperial working to understand and support mental health in the current climate and ecological crises. A collaboration between Institute of Global Health Innovation and The Grantham Institute (climate change and the environment). ‘We enable people, communities and systems to have both the emotional resilience and transformative potential to cope with the climate emergency and take meaningful climate action. We work collectively for a better climate future that benefits mental health and wellbeing’. 
  • Connecting Climate Minds  – a Climate Cares global project  ‘working to foster connections between people all over the world to come together to understand and respond to the deep interconnections between climate change and mental health’. Currently working on developing a global online hub as the ‘go to’ space for climate change and mental health resources 
  • Existential Toolkit – Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators – ‘Building resilience in your students and yourself in an age of crisis’. This is book can be bought – the website has example chapters and extensive links to additional resources such as videos and podcasts. 
  • UBC Climate Hub – A student-led University-wide initiative that aims to connect and empower university and community stakeholders to take bold climate action for a just future. Includes the Climate Wellbeing engagement network resources.
  • Teaching climate change affectively: a facilitator’s guide developed experts at the University of Hawaii and Portland Community College
  • SOS-UK (Students organising for sustainability) – workshops, support, templates and guidance for higher education students looking to take action and start campaigns in their own universities.
  • Addressing climate emotions in higher education this report was published by the 2024 Collective Futures Cohort at the University of Amsterdam in collaboration with the Climate Majority Project

 

Compiled by:

Chantal Burns, Author, Resilience Coach

Siobhan Currie, Educational and Child Psychologist

Louise Edgington, Educational and Climate Psychologist

 

This campaign is in collaboration with:

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