 Good day. Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this session entitled, How to Live Meaningfully with Climate Anxiety. Lots of concepts in that title. My name is Fernando Gomez. I'm part of the Center of Nature and Climate here at the World Economic Forum and incredibly honored to welcome today a conversation and illustration of what we see as an emerging and incredibly important issue bridging two areas of Equally high importance. Before we get started, I would love to ask all of you I cannot do it with all of you who are joining us virtually, but those of you who are here in the room just a show of hands Who cares about climate change? That's a hundred percent. What about mental health? That's almost a hundred percent. So if you care about these two topics This is the right place to be because the next 30 minutes We're going to be looking at the intersection of those two very important areas I'm very privileged to welcome Dr. Britt Ray Who is the director of a special initiative of the chair on climate change and mental health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the School of Medicine of Stanford University Dr. Ray is an author a professor a researcher in this area and I hope you are just as excited as I am to learn over the next 30 minutes how to that is the title of this how to live with anxiety and climate change. So Britt, please join me here Good morning, everyone. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here with you all I thought that we could get warmed up together in this session with a bit of imagery Do you remember when this happened a few years ago and the skies turned orange in San Francisco from wildfire smoke a similar phenomenon happened recently in New York City when smoke from tons of Canadian wildfires rolled over choked the sky and Actors on Broadway had to stop performing because it was getting too hard to breathe Now eerie events like this are disturbing reminders that our activities are breaking the climactic and Ecological conditions that allowed civilization to evolve and thrive Which when you give it space to really land in your heart is a deeply distressing thought And so today we're going to explore the often ignored mental health emergency within the climate crisis that will distress and traumatize billions of people if Leaders do not make deep seated changes to how the mental health of their populations is protected and promoted Faster and more effectively than has ever been done before And so I'd like to just get a quick show of hands. How many of you have ever lost sleep worrying about the climate crisis? Maybe what it means for your life or for your children. Yeah How about a pang of grief for the up to 1 million species that scientists tell us that we are pushing to extinction by the end of the century? So I've certainly felt these things too and they're valid appropriate emotional responses to the troubled state of the world and yes They can drive distress, but they can also be harnessed for meaningful and courageous climate action if we are thoughtful About how we approach this moment Because the climate crisis affects mental health through multiple pathways There's the direct stressors typhoons hurricanes wildfires droughts and the interruptions that these cause to necessities like food and Shelter and work which can drive clinical anxiety and depression post traumatic stress disorder substance abuse and suicidality And then there's a really well known link between extreme heat and violent behavior and suicides as well on these heat wave days that we keep Happing having the hospital admission rates for self-harm tend to increase and we know that the Psychological impacts of disaster outweigh the physical impacts about 40 to 1 Then there's physical health and climate change makes a sick full stop it affects air quality Nutrition the spread of vector-borne diseases and more and as we get physically sicker our mental health tends to suffer too So for instance asthma made worse by the burning of fossil fuels that pollute the air is associated with an increased risk of anxiety and depression and Then there is the bad news about the climate crisis all around us all the time Which is stoking mental and emotional distress But we're not all equally vulnerable those hit hardest and first include children and young people Women people on the front lines of disaster who are disproportionately located in the global south Those who can't evacuate quickly which endangers the elderly and people living with disabilities and poor people Now those living with pre-existing mental illness are two to three times more likely to die in a heat wave And there's people who are living an intimate relationship with quickly changing landscapes like ranchers and farmers and indigenous peoples worldwide who are specifically vulnerable to these threats and Then there's the frontline climate professionals the climate scientists the climate activists the climate journalists and green policy makers Some of whom for which Experience a crushing psychological toll by studiously bearing witness to the breakdown of a safe climate in their day jobs and And so it's not just that the climate crisis threatens life and livelihood and therefore our mental health It's also that as these events traumatize individuals and overwhelm our communities and stress our health systems our ability to protect the climate by transforming the complex systems in which we're living gets thwarted because How battered we feel determines how well we can build a new world and if we get entrapped in a spiral of spiritual Emotional and psychological crises we can really only focus so much on getting through the day Let alone doing all this massive work. We know that we're here to do in the transition So it's a vicious cycle and we need to think and act differently So in recent years new terminology has emerged to describe people's emotional changing response to our shifting world Like solestalgia This is a term that describes the feeling of homesickness when you're still at home after so much negative Environmental change have happened there that you can no longer recognize it as home and access the solace that it used to give you Perhaps you've heard of climate anxiety This is a popular widely used but rather imprecise term to talk about a mix of negative emotion worry terror dread about the climate crisis and Despite the clinical sounding name Researchers and clinicians have rallied to argue that Climate anxiety is not a pathology and we shouldn't treat it as an illness as though it's some kind of Psychological psychiatric problem within an individual when one we're dealing with is really a symptom of external sources of danger That affect the whole population So there's an appropriateness and a rationality to feeling some anxiety about this problem And this is why it's also been suggested that perhaps we should think of climate anxiety It's climate compassion instead a sign that we are awake to reality and that we care for everything that is in harm's way But it gets complicated rather quickly So in the literature we see climate anxiety paired with pro environmental behavior climate activism again and again Because it can really startle a person get them to wake up and look around and then reassess how boldly they're taking climate action Greta Thunberg for instance went through an intense period of climate despair and anxiety and depression Before launching a global movement of students striking for climate action but if a person isn't supported it can threaten mental health so much that it impairs functioning and It's been associated with sleep problems panic attacks eating disorders and suicidal thoughts and behavior And if you think that I'm exaggerating just listen to these statistics So in order to understand the psychological impacts of the climate crisis on young people around the world my colleagues and I surveyed 10,000 16 to 25 year olds in 10 countries We were looking across places like India Nigeria the Philippines Brazil Finland France Australia the US and We were alarmed by what we found 45% of youth globally say that their thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis are interfering with daily life tasks such as eating sleeping Concentrating and this rose to 70% in the global South countries and on the whole 75% of young people say that the future is frightening to them because of the climate crisis 56% endorsed the statement that humanity is doomed and 39% said that they are hesitant to have their own children one day because of the climate crisis Okay, in a different study this time of an American sample we found that youth who had been exposed to at least one climate event were Significantly more likely to factor climate change into their future plans around things like what kind of education to get and travel aspirations as they feel that they must go visit places before they expect they're gonna disappear and Again thoughts about whether or not to have a child or children and In a different study yet this time in adults across Japan India China in the US researchers found that China and India had the highest rates of climate anxiety and that more than 20% in China and 30% in India Experience functionally impairing climate anxiety at least as often as sometimes or frequently So I'll be honest with you that the reason why even do this research now is because there was a time when I myself was So stressed out about the climate crisis that internal peace was rather scant And at that time I was working as a science communicator and climate reports were coming across my desk every day And I felt like I was just kind of staring into the abyss of this difficult data And then I would come home and my partner and I would talk about trying to get pregnant but Looking at the warming projections and ineffective action to flatten the curve and the disasters ramping up And then just seeing what this is all leading to I Experienced this question as a disturbing and tormenting dilemma and to my surprise that actually unleashed Cascades of grief and anger and anxiety about the state of the crisis and It started impacting my ability to concentrate and affecting my relationships and I felt like I was going crazy But then pretty quickly a variety of reports statistics and campaigns emerged to show me how commonly felt the sentiment was around the world Including the no future no children pledge which was created by Canadian Undergraduate students and was signed on to by more than 10,000 youth around the world to declare that they are refusing to reproduce until governments make it Safe for them to do so with adequate climate action Okay, so the rise of this sentiment and how quickly it was emerging particularly in the West was captured in a Recent documentary called the climate baby dilemma and we can just watch a couple seconds in a clip When I first started questioning What it meant to have a child in an increasingly dire climate crisis scenario I felt very deviant for even asking the question Then you had celebrities like Miley Cyrus to politicians making statements There's scientific consensus and it does lead. I think young people to Have a legitimate question Clearly it is a luxury to dread the future when so many who've been marginalized already acutely fear the present and Need psychosocial support to deal with the disasters on their doorstep However, climate anxiety in the rise of it everywhere is also a catalyst for Privileged people who haven't felt unsafe before to develop new bridges of solidarity with the most climate impacted communities And just to close the loop on this I did end up having the child I'm very glad that I did and it's not because my climate anxiety magically went away It's because I learned to respect the anxiety Because we should not be at peace with the way that things are and it's over time helped navigate me to a new career Where I can now work on mental health innovations with directly impacted communities in Stanford's medical school So at this late stage in our failed efforts to globally solve the climate crisis Climate anxiety. I'd like to propose it as a painful but necessary Growth edge and really powerful rocket fuel out there for meaningful purpose and change So the good news is that there's a ton that we can do to protect and promote mental health in our warming world So by focusing on practices and policies that are co-benefiting and have win-win solutions for both problems at once we can really unlock a cascade of Mental health protections that also support climate mitigation and adaptation And if there's one thing that I hope I can leave you with today It's that if we massively ramp up our investments in a public health approach to rising climate mental health challenges Will not only prevent a lot of trauma that will otherwise come but will support resilience in communities that help to mitigate warming so the ability of People in a region to come together and coordinate their efforts to achieve shared goals is what's known as Social capital and we have a lot of good disaster psychiatry research to show us that those with high social capital and connectedness in The aftermath of disaster developed far lower rates of mental illness than those who have low social capital in One study of cyclones that ripped through an Australian town and took the roofs off of children's homes The kids in the local school who had the most social trust and connectedness others in their lives that they could go to Develop far lower post-traumatic stress disorder than the kids in the school who are more socially isolated and lonely And so in a climate context social capital connectedness cohesion trust This can be fostered by bringing communities together to work on environmental problems that they care about in the places Where they live because it's through the process of doing something like let's say Figuring out how to implement a tree planting program in urban heat islands that protect residents from heat Especially on extremely hot heat wave days and give them access to nature, which is good for mental health But also absorb carbon dioxide from the system You learn how to lead and follow and trust each other such that when the disasters do come rolling through your protective social infrastructure is already there in place and it needs to be there ahead of time it can't just come after in order to have that Reduction of trauma and mental illness So this sounds easy and it is in the sense that this is us doing what we do we're humans We're relational human beings. We want to love and be liked and get along however at this time there are more humans living alone than ever in history and Loneliness has emerged as a public health epidemic in many countries around the world So this trend of social isolation and loneliness is working Against our efforts to prevent trauma and we need to help people increase their social cohesion and Then there's the fact that some traumas aren't going to be prevented We're going to need to respond however as we saw with COVID right Mental health needs of populations is not being met by many nations around the world There just aren't enough clinicians and also in many lever low resource settings the infrastructure is just missing But here too we have solutions to get beyond the fact that the one-on-one narrow biomedical model is falling short So in global mental health, we've seen that you can take specialists Away from being care providers and turn them into trainers and then they train lay leaders on the ground to go out into their Community and help their neighbors with these interventions that they've been equipped with that have been stripped of their jargon and simplified And then they can help people with things like anxiety and depression and Clinical trials have shown that this task-shifting approach as it's called can be even more effective at helping people heal and recover than primary care So when we're thinking about the solutions toolkit that we can invest in now and spread and scale to the scope of the problem We can remember that Trauma prevention looks like doing a favor and working with your neighbors and then Adequate care and response looks like peer sharing for scalable caring And of course the main intervention for mental health that will prevent these problems from spreading is Serious structural change and quitting our addiction to fossil fuels But while we're still struggling to do that in ways that are fair and just we can help ourselves by identifying and amplifying The protective factors that build resilience in the places where we live and as we go throughout our days So resilience building protecting factors are all the things that help us be with suffering that's out there in the world and the suffering that is in our lives and not be indifferent to it and Generate at the same time enough happiness and joy that we can live lives of service to other people service to Mother Earth and Cultivate meaning and purpose which protects our well-being from those actions So this can look like emotional self-regulation skills that you can practice with mindfulness and spiritual practices and drawing strength from one's ancestors and Going beyond black and white cognitions to have flexible thinking that helps us keep things in perspective and self-efficacy the deep belief that our actions no matter how small really do matter and forest bathing this intentional practice of going into nature for Eco-therapeutic effect which is linked to your restored attention and decreased anxiety and Depression and for some of the most climate anxious youth around the world today We need to help them access a growth mindset so this is what psychologists talk about when we can shift from seeing adversities as direct threats to Opportunities opportunities to practice new things to play to try out new ways of being with other people to learn and to grow Because this breeds a sense of possibility and purpose and active hope So to meet this rising distress a plethora of resources have gotten off the ground in recent years like climate cafes this is a decentralized network of Meetings where people can have frank conversations in a validating setting It's happening all over the world to discuss how the climate crisis is making them feel why that is and what they can do about it There's climate aware therapy now, too You can find this in climate psychology alliances climate psychiatry alliance where clinicians take a non pathologizing approach to their mental health care and Then there's peer support programs a beacon of which is the Good Grief Network These folks offer a 10-step program that allow people to soothe their climate anxiety and community and then find ways To reinvest the energy they've lost from being stressed out into actions that Matter to them and that are purposeful at this time and anyone can be trained as a facilitator of this program Which is already being used in 16 countries So my team and I at Stanford School of Medicine are accelerating a movement that Centers a public health approach to rising mental health challenges by researching and implementing community-minded healing interventions that build resilience across connected networks of communities and Training clinicians on their important role within these community interventions and in order to Unleash a suite of mental health tools that could really touch everyone in a population rather than just focus on ill individuals we need to build new and powerful infrastructure to get the job done and We are looking for partners who believe in this mission and vision and want to help shape it and we hope that you will join us The climate crisis it's anthropogenic right we hear that all the time it's caused by human behavior and Yet where have the behaviorists been at the decision-making table for all these years as we've been talking about gigatons and graphs and carbon taxes and Technologies and look at where we are The time to tap into behavior science to psychology has come Yes to help populations make better decisions that are more sustainable and also To create a more effective ground game of community organizing that's built off of shared grievances Because that's the only thing that's ever allowed people to come together and work together across their differences and fragmentation to build a better world Because when we're talking about what you're losing and what they're losing what I'm losing what that feels like and How that keeps us up at night? We can tap into a shared emotive landscape that at some level everyone is feeling Because how we live how we work what young people's families look like all this is destabilizing in the climate crisis and it can drive illness and distress and despair but it's exactly at this locus of Emotion that the global community needs to meet to unlock power and solidarity For meaningful change that can drive us towards the appropriate emergency response And so I would like to conclude with a quote from researchers who put the value of climate distress really eloquently in the medical journal The Lancet when they write Recognizing that emotions are often what leads people to act it is possible that feelings of ecological anxiety and grief although Uncomfortable are in fact the crucible through which humanity must pass to harness the energy and conviction that are needed For the life-saving changes now required Thank you so much. And if there's any questions, I'd love to take them Yes, oh I think there's a mic coming Regarding the intersection between the sort of mental effects of the climate of climate anxiety versus the physical effects of climate anxiety How do you sort of think about the equilibrium and I guess how to manage it equally and you know push forwards Well, they're both equally important right because functional impairment can be cognitive But it can also be physical and somatic Emotions can trip us up. It looks like the most functionally impairing aspects Can impede behaviors and climate anxiety and so we need to pay attention to that But this is why we need a suite of tools. There's no one so silver bullet here Right, we need supportive communities that help preserve well-being so that people can access resources that are going to work for them Based on what their triggers are maybe it needs to be Generative somatics and mindfulness practices that work with regulating the nervous system Maybe it needs to be more existential approaches about building robust hope and courage to take on the climate crisis and not fall Into a deep crevice of despair that entraps one in a sense of fatalism Which is also a sentiment that's spreading out there So I think the answer is all of the above need to be paid attention to and we need to tap on Especially the wisdom of communities who have long understood what it means to live on the nice edge of existential threat and have found ways of banding together and fighting for a better future and instilling, you know difficult situations with ways of Improving health and supporting the next generation and essentially maintaining mental robustness So that it's not the sky is falling mentality But it's actually looking to history for strength about how we've gotten through turbulent times before and can apply that to the situation now Okay, I think we had a question here and then we'll go over there. Thank you so much. It's very interesting I just want to learn from you and Stanford Scientists about how you guys are measuring climate anxiety, right? Are you using sensor to measure that or survey base? You know given that there's a lot of bias in questionnaire based surveys. Yeah So we have psychometrically validated scales So these are standardized scales that go out and you can use in different populations to compare results About different cognitive and emotional and behavioral aspects of climate anxiety and how it can show up in a person's life The field is still pretty nascent So we've been around a few years and so people are still like having those academic sites about what exactly the right metrics are to be Measuring this construct, but they exist. They're being reproduced and unfolded largely through psychological surveys so far But I think it's moving in a direction of collaboration with neuroscientists to also get inside. Yeah Yes So my name is Rana Dajani. I'm a professor of molecular biology from Jordan One thing I have two two questions one is how do you in order for the Humanity to respond to climate change and take responsibility You need to address the masses not just a few groups here and there and the masses usually adhere to a particular faith or religion And yet religion and faith is really not brought up in these conversations as if it's a taboo And I know the WHO doesn't even mention it yet We know I come from the Muslim faith Which is 1.7 billion people and there's a Christian faith and there's Hindu and Buddhism. So how are you integrating? The cons the concept of faith and religion so that people can draw from those traditions Habits and practices for example in Islam. We we take care of earth. We are the guardians of earth We we do ritual practices for mental health when we pray five times a day Which is the alone time or when we pray in a group. So these are practices rather than introducing something new Yeah, people will adapt them once you invoke that this is already part of what you do and when you do it You're actually helping and so you're actually harnessing that potential. So that's one The second question, which is the tools that you just mentioned the psychometric tools that you're using to measure people's Response to anxiety for climate as a molecular biologist I'm always very skeptical of surveys to really capture human behavior So there are new a few new methods and I don't know if you're applying them Which is using fuzzy cognitive mapping so they can really map not just the person But the relationship of that person with the other people in their world and their ecosystem and the strengths of their Relationships that you really understand what is going on in that community because as you said we don't live as an individual So yeah, I'd appreciate your remarks on those wonderful. Thank you So on the point of religion you're absolutely right and spirituality religion Culturally traditional practices that give people a sense of identity and belonging and that work with the resilience Stores that they already have are absolutely key here and those belong in those slides about protective factors that I mentioned And being able to really harness that and bring that out. So working with faith leaders is absolutely key I think the climate movement has done not done enough of it we need to work together across our fragmentation by going to the homes of deeply authentic community where people already are which means working with faith leaders and You know the Pope has already done some incredible work on this with Laudato see for instance the publication He released on climate action from a spiritual perspective and hopefully we will be seeing more spiritual leaders bringing this up in their communities But I am very excited about doing these community human Community-minded healing intervention specifically in religious spaces for exactly that reason now on the point of measurement So yeah, there's lots of good reasons to be skeptical of self-report surveys and how accurate the data is it's a start It's a good place to get snapshots. We need longitudinal data. We're starting to capture that now and this functional Network mapping that you're talking about sounds like a very useful tool Additionally, we also need robust qualitative data because this is human Experience that we need to capture in order to refine the tools So right now what we're doing is we're building a global research and action agenda with partners all around the world In this project with the welcome trust by creating seven regional hubs Dividing the world into these seven regions and then working with committees of indigenous people's youth farmers other directly affected populations to then Identify and lift up the stories of lived experience of people who are suffering with climate mental health challenges so that that can feed into a repository globally that drives funding agendas and Helps researchers understand exactly ways to locate their research questions to have the best impact for the affected communities So these things are happening, but again, we think that it needs to be a mixed method approach And it's all yeah, it's all pretty new. So if you have ideas, please do feed in we're hungry for them. Yes So I have a question more on next steps. You mentioned that the largest portion of the population that is heavily impacted as youth You said it was also very nascent Are you or are the next steps to start working with ministries of education ministries of health in some of the countries that you Mentioned have the highest levels of climate anxiety amongst those people. Yeah, absolutely And climate education programs are a key source of bringing in psychosocial support And socio-emotional learning to deal with the distress that we're seeing in youth Essentially what's happening right now is that environmental educators around the world are Showing up to class and they're just doing their job of teaching about the global environmental threats And then they have classrooms of despairing students who are feeling futureless and they're saying oh my goodness I'm just doing my job But I'm actually now being a therapist in my office hours for my students rather than helping them on their exams Because they need a shoulder to cry on and I don't want to worsen this Intense emotional response. So what do I do the problem is there's been no place for emotions in the climate environmental sciences It's like leaving an elephant in the room Around what kids are learning which makes the heaviness harder for them to manage So we need trauma-informed learning modules to help bring in supportive active hope Collective and self-efficacy approaches and also just emotional regulation tools to help with this But we need to do it in culturally sensitive ways so working with ministries absolutely Working with nations on their climate adaptation and strategies to be able to do this piece with education It's a place that a lot of people in the field are looking. I Saw that the questions that I'm so sorry time was just called. Thank you so much I'll be around so if you'd like to chat. I'd love to take this further. Thanks for coming