The Psychological Threat of Climate Change

It’s easy to let climate change get us down. To allow political tide of anti-sustainability rhetoric to carry you away. But while it is easy to feel despondent from time to time, it is important to feel safe when expressing your emotions. To help us, Dr Nadine Andrews, an Honorary Researcher here at the Pentland Centre, and a facilitator of climate and eco psychology processes, brings her expertise to talk us through the mental and psychological toll climate change can take on us. We consider how the urgency of climate change can hit us; learn about psycho-social factors and how they affect us; talk about the values-action gap and where that fits in terms of behaviour on sustainability; look at climate change as a psychological threat, and how that manifests in each of us. Nadine tells us about her work studying sustainability professionals, and how they would suppress their beliefs in the workplace, how they revitalise themselves, and how it could all lead to burnout. Is it inevitable that the more we know about climate change, the more emotionally affected by it we will be? Nadine gives us the evidence from her work with climate assemblies, and how members felt after their involvement – and after the Scottish government responded. Plus, we get out the thesaurus to consider vitality, well-being, hope, optimism and thriving in a sustainability context; put negative emotions in the bin in favour of difficult emotions; remember to think about non-human people; and ask if is Paul undercharging for his therapy sessions? Read about Nadine’s work with climate assemblies here: https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_FiftyFourDegrees_Issue_16/22/ Recent research on climate concern can be found here: https://www.lrfoundation.org.uk/news/global-concern-about-climate-change-reaches-record-high And this is a resource for understanding the values action gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-action_gap Episode Transcript