How to cope with climate anxiety - Evanston RoundTable

How to cope with climate anxiety - Evanston RoundTable

According to conservation psychologist Susan Clayton, hopelessness “lets us off the hook by saying that action and behavioral change are pointless. Hope allows us to envision a future in which people and societies can continue, thrive, and even experience positive transformation.” If you’re looking for ways to cope with climate anxiety, here are tips for taking positive action and finding hope.

Build Evanston’s climate literacy

- Support climate education and seek direction to build climate education curricula tailored to each grade level. The District 65 Climate Action Team has joined forces with community members outside of Evanston to push for climate education at the state level.
- As parents and community members, learn about how climate change affects people of all backgrounds, including the nuances of their lived experiences.
- Talk to older children about how they are feeling. Be on the lookout for any signs that a child is struggling with anxiety about climate change.
- Acknowledge all the hard feelings: betrayal by government inaction, anger about the inequity of impacts, guilt about your own involvement. If you are a parent, validate your child’s feelings without arguing. Tell your child, “We can talk about this.”
- Recognize that building climate change concerns in younger children to combat apathy and promote action can backfire by breeding despair and inaction, especially among younger children who view climate challenges as out of their control.
- Frame communication about climate change to motivate action vs. resignation or denial. Help to build confidence that the Evanston community can prepare for and help prevent further climate change.

Connect

- Look for ways to strengthen community cohesion and build social networks to involve and inform the community. Work to create a sense of safety and foster optimism.
- Encourage city leadership and staff, institutions, businesses and community organizations to work together and find solutions based on community values and local conditions in Evanston.
- Explore barriers and opportunities for engagement based on each group’s role and experiences. Highlight environmental justice issues and success stories to encourage involvement by students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Promote information sharing, joint policy action and funding to support health care professionals, educators and community leaders in building mental resilience and to collaborate in addressing climate emotions, especially among women, children and older adults who are at higher risks of stress
- If you are a health professional, speak out about the intersectionality of anxiety, stress and depression with effects of extreme heat and other climate-related issues.

Take action to increase emotional and physical resilience

- Address outdated infrastructure, e.g., lack of adequate extreme weather warning system, inadequate storm surge preparedness measures, or clogged or inadequate storm sewer systems.
- Identify and relieve social stressors that leave some neighborhoods with fewer physical and emotional resources to deal with climate change impacts, e.g., areas with high numbers of residents lacking access to health care or health insurance, or already experiencing poor health ( EPLAN).
- Build social cohesion and connectedness that address social inequalities, lack of trust between community members and institutions, and other ways that inhibit community members from working together.
- Join an Evanston group like E-Town Sunrise and Climate Action Evanston working on concrete, communitywide actions for people of all ages to engage in directly.