The groups and the materials

An overview of how Living with the climate crisis groups work, and the materials we offer to support you in running the groups

Living with the Climate Crisis groups are a mix of psychologically based groupwork and experiential learning which can be used flexibly to support people in managing their feelings, experiences and actions about the climate and ecological crises.

The groups are designed to be run face-to-face in the local communities where people live and work, feeding into and helping to develop collective responses and collective action. The groups aim to help people:

• find support for the complexity and pain of their feelings;
• communicate with empathy and skill about the crisis;
• find a place in collective action that is personally sustainable;
• share ways to still find meaning, joy and satisfaction in the precarious world we all now find ourselves in.

The approach is rooted in psycho-social theory, climate psychology and systemic practice.

Module one: ‘Coming together and putting down roots’, covers climate distress, loss and grief, and the Tree of Life method.

Module two: ‘Communication’ draws on ideas from psychotherapy about content and process, on Marshall Ganz’s public narrative method and on insights from social psychology about messaging.

Module three: ‘The ecosystem of change’, uses ideas from systems thinking, from reflective practice and from the science of carbon reduction.

The Materials page has the facilitators guide and all the other materials you need to run Living with the climate crisis.

More information about the approach and its practice are in the downloadable Facilitators guide which describes the groups in detail.

Living with the climate crisis was developed by the authors with the support of other therapists and activists involved in the Climate Psychology Alliance, Cambridge Climate Therapists, and the Carbon Conversations project, which it now replaces. It is hosted and managed by the Climate Psychology Alliance.