Dr Beth Hill from Psychology for a Safe Climate joined us in August to talk about looking after our mental wellbeing while staying engaged with the climate crisis.

Beth Hill: Hi everyone, thank you so much for inviting me along to your meeting. As I was saying to Sheree, Susan and Wendy before we started, it's such a privilege to come along and chat with folks like you who are really on the front lines advocating for climate action — hopefully some of what I share tonight is useful.

I'll start with my name — I'm Beth, and I work as Programs Manager with Psychology for a Safe Climate. I'm speaking to you tonight on Wurundjeri Country in Narrm, also known as Melbourne, and I want to pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to honour the continuing care for culture and community happening across this continent by First Nations people — and how vital the connection is between First Nations justice and climate justice.

I'm here to talk a little about navigating climate emotions together, but before that, I'll touch briefly on who Psychology for a Safe Climate is, for anyone not familiar with our work — this artwork here is from a workshop we ran last year with young people, mapping their climate emotions creatively through stencils of their bodies.

About Psychology for a Safe Climate

Psychology for a Safe Climate was founded in 2010 and is Australia's leading NGO at the intersection of climate and mental health. Our tagline is simple and easy to remember: emotions move us, we move the climate — really understanding the relationship between how we think and feel, and what we then go on to do. We focus on strengthening the emotional foundations of communities responding to the crisis — people like yourselves — by putting care into climate action.

We're grounded in the Australian context, and we focus a lot on relationality — bringing cultural awareness, compassion, creativity and connection with nature into the work we do; we love getting people out into nature to connect with that nourishment. We have a genuinely multidisciplinary membership — we're called Psychology for a Safe Climate, but we're not all psychologists. My own background is social research and anthropology, specialising in the cultural and emotional dimensions of climate change; my colleague Bronwyn is a clinical psychologist, and beyond that we have researchers, psychotherapists, counsellors, activists, facilitators and artists all contributing to how we think about and do this work.

One thing we bring to the fore is the understanding that climate distress, and the genuinely difficult feelings many of us have about climate change, can't be treated as an afterthought — they need to be woven into how we respond to the crisis. We work across three areas, though I won't go into that in detail tonight, since I've only got half an hour and want to focus on some things you can personally take away.

The climate journey

I want to start with what we call the "climate journey" — an area PSC has worked in for many years. We used to run climate grief workshops that helped people explore when they first made contact with climate change, and how it affected them. The idea of framing it as a "journey" was brought into PSC by my colleague Kristy Wilson, and it's proven a really useful tool for helping people land and ground themselves in where they are right now.

Looking at a slide like this, you might read it as linear — we've put numbered waypoints on it — but for anyone actually living through a climate journey, and I'm sure you all are if you're here tonight, you'll know it's rarely that neat. You might start somewhere like "becoming aware," jump straight into something like adaptation through engagement and action, do that for a long time, get tired, and find you need support and connection. Or you might move into a lot of sadness and realise you need space to really emotionally engage — and after that emotional engagement, you might become overwhelmed, and find yourself moving back into a kind of disavowal.

Disavowal gets a bit of a bad rap, but it can happen even to people who are genuinely engaged with climate change — when burnout happens and we need to disengage for a while, we can move into a state where we acknowledge climate change is real, but disavow the gravity or immediacy of its impacts. Further along the journey are stages like cultivating regeneration and compassion, and, at stage eight, integrating and sustaining resilience through ongoing action.

We don't have time tonight to hear from each of you about exactly where you are on this journey, but it might be worth quietly noticing which of these waypoints feels most resonant for you right now — and noting that you might be somewhere different tomorrow morning, or next week. Events in our lives, political developments, and climate impacts happening around us can all shift where we land on this journey.

Some statistics

A few statistics to help ground the intersection between mental health and climate. First, on helplessness: in a survey of 2,000 Australians a few years ago, 52% of people reported feelings of helplessness and despair thinking about the climate crisis — and by show of hands here tonight, a fair few of you can relate to that too. A separate international survey from around 2021, of 10,000 participants, found 60% of people reported feeling very or extremely worried about climate change. These feelings are common and widespread, even if we don't always talk about them day to day.

A more sobering figure, from Climate Council research in 2023 — and I suspect it may be even higher now — found that 80% of Australians reported experiencing some form of climate-related disaster at least once since 2019. It's worth remembering, when we gather in groups like this or talk to people in public, that it's highly likely the people we're engaging with have lived through a climate disaster themselves, or have a close connection to someone who has. The deeper emotions and trauma that come with that are very live and real, and we need to be conscious and careful in how we navigate these conversations. Bringing a bit more psychological and emotional understanding into them can make them safer, and more constructive too.

Relatedly, research shows that cases of psychological trauma from disasters exceed physical injury by roughly 40 to 1 — for every visible physical impact, there are around forty other impacts that tend to be invisible, because the way our mental health is affected isn't usually visible to the people around us.

Finally, there's still a widespread cultural stigma around wellbeing and mental health more broadly in Australia. Things are improving, and on an international scale Australia actually has a fairly positive relationship with talking about difficult topics like depression and anxiety — but it remains one of the biggest challenges for climate scientists and professionals to keep talking about this publicly, and in their workplaces.

Climate anxiety and the wider emotional landscape

I want to touch on climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety — terms that get used a lot in the media. A commonly cited definition, from an American Psychological Association report around 2017–2018, describes eco-anxiety as a source of stress caused by watching the slow — or these days, often quite fast — and irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, one's children, and later generations. I'd add that many of us are now also worrying about the present, looking at things like glacier collapse, huge bushfire seasons across Europe, and the arrival of bird flu here in Australia — this is very much a right-now problem.

The trouble is, when we only talk about "eco-anxiety," we miss the much wider range of emotions people actually feel engaging with this crisis. This word cloud is one we've put together at PSC, based on a paper by Finnish researcher Panu Pihkala called "The Taxonomy of Climate Emotions," which went through the latest research and compiled a long list of the feelings people report. It's not comprehensive, but you can see a real spectrum — from difficult feelings like despair or guilt, through to feelings we'd usually consider pleasant or positive, like hope, love or solidarity. It's not that everything we feel about the climate and ecological crisis is negative — there's a huge landscape of feeling here.

When we can articulate these feelings for ourselves and with each other, it opens up real diversity in the creativity, responses and actions we might then take. When we get stuck in what I call the "despair–anxiety–hope" triad — the three things people tend to default to when talking about psychology and climate — we flatten that landscape, and reduce the inner diversity of our own emotional lives. Just as diversity is vital for a healthy ecosystem, emotional diversity is vital for our mental health and wellbeing too.

A live word cloud exercise

I ran a short, anonymous live exercise with the group — sharing climate emotions via a QR code into a shared, real-time word cloud, so we could get a sense of what emotions were present in the room without knowing who said what. I encouraged people to get creative — some of the words in the version I'd shared earlier included solastalgia and blistinance (that second one describes the odd dissonance of enjoying warm sun in early August and feeling like it really shouldn't be this warm yet). Words that came up repeatedly grew larger on screen, and people were welcome to add ones already there rather than needing something unique each time — bouncing off and learning from each other's feelings is part of the value of doing this work together rather than alone, since this is a crisis we're living through collectively. We really advocate for processes that support people doing this work together, in groups.

Words that came through in our own group included solidarity, frustration, grief (quite prominent), fatigue, flatness, a phrase like "shared and forward," helplessness, contempt, purpose, connection, and shock — a genuine diversity of feeling, even within one group, and for some people, a chance to name a feeling — like guilt — they may never have spoken aloud before. Sometimes it's simply a relief to have the opportunity to talk about it.

Stepping back, there's a whole spectrum of climate emotions worth naming: emotions that reflect loss (grief, sadness, despair, disappointment); emotions that connect us (hope, belonging, gratitude — and grief connects us too, because it's tied to love); emotions that protect and insulate us when we need it (numbness, avoidance, disconnection); emotions about our role (guilt, responsibility, commitment, shame); and emotions that activate us towards action (anger, determination, urgency, love, fear). Rather than treating emotions as purely negative or positive, it's more useful to ask what information they contain that we can learn from, and how that might inform effective action. Opening up to emotions as a source of information opens up a whole other way of understanding our lives, and what we want to do about what matters to us, and about our own sense of purpose.

Reflections from the group

I invited a few reflections on what it was like to see the word cloud building in real time.

Guest: For me, actually seeing such a litany of different things makes me feel more connected to everyone in the group — it shows that all these different feelings are valid, and something we all share.

Beth Hill: Thanks — I can see a few other people nodding along with that too. Often we can be hesitant to share what we're feeling, especially something difficult, because we think we're protecting other people by keeping it to ourselves. But when we do share, paradoxically it often lifts each other up — there's a sense of connection there, and of hope too.

Guest: I noticed I didn't actually write "hope" into the word cloud — I do feel very hopeful, maybe even too positive sometimes — but I didn't write it down.

Beth Hill: You still can! And that's another thing about our emotional worlds — maybe the feelings we experience most commonly are the ones we forget to name, because we default to the things we're most used to thinking about. When we give ourselves time to talk to each other, other emotions we hadn't noticed start to surface. If I had longer with you tonight, I'd send you off into breakout rooms with some prompts to really talk this through with each other — that's where the real magic of this work happens. Consider tonight just a taster.

Guest (Steve): Doing this work myself has helped other people come to a sense of purpose and motivation — there's something much bigger to be part of than a purely local or capitalistic framing. That's very grounding for me.

Beth Hill: Thanks, Steve.

Guest (David): Looking at the word cloud, there seem to be a lot of words for the negative end of things, and comparatively few for positive emotions — I don't think "happy" came up at all, and beyond "hope," there isn't much there. It gives the cloud a bit of a depressing look, which feels like a bit of a danger, from that point of view. I can't actually think of many others myself.

Beth Hill: Interesting reflection, David — and I can see Pamela's keen to respond to that, so I'll let her go.

Guest (Pamela): I actually feel a bit excited seeing that we're a whole group of people thinking about the climate emergency together — I think that's worth surfacing too.

Beth Hill: That's a good example of just how diverse people's responses to the cloud itself can be — there's no single way to feel looking at this. For some people, naming difficult feelings is a relief; for others, it can be genuinely confronting. I run this word cloud exercise a lot in workshops across the country with people in the climate and nature movement, and the full range of responses comes through every time. Often people write things like love and connection quite strongly, or belonging — and sometimes joy, speaking to the joy people find in connecting with others and taking action; not joy at what's happening in the world, which would be strange, but joy bound up in the act of engaging and acting itself. It's really about expanding our emotional vocabulary — how we think about what climate means, and how it plays out through our lives.

Key takeaways on climate emotions

I want to finish with a few key things to take away and think about together.

Climate emotions are fluid, embodied responses to the world around us — we feel them through our senses and our bodies, and our bodies are themselves expressions of the earth. Some writers, like Glenn Albrecht, talk about these as "earth emotions" — the earth feeling through us. They can be pleasant, painful, or neutral, and variation is the norm. It's when emotions become so intense they're overwhelming, or we respond to them in ways that make things worse, that we move into something more like climate distress — which tends to feel like suffering and stuckness, without much variation or colour to it.

The key difference is that distress happens when we lack the inner, social or community resources to meet the pain we're experiencing — it isn't a personal inadequacy, but a sign that a whole set of resources needs to come together to support us. Importantly, distress is preventable, and it's a signal that we need support — whereas emotions themselves are not preventable; you will have them, they will happen, and the real question is how we support ourselves and each other to hold them in a supported, constructive way, rather than tipping into distress and getting stuck there. That said, distress isn't something to demonise either — it plays an important role in alerting us to the fact that something is urgently needed.

Six things worth remembering about climate emotions, some of which I've already touched on:

1. Emotions are information — we need to let go of the old duality between emotion and rational thought; the research shows that's simply not how our brains work.

2. We rarely feel just one emotion at a time — they're not problems to fix so we can "get on with the real work"; they can be, and often are, part of what drives action.

3. They're collective — we're experiencing this together.

4. Our climate emotions exist alongside our lived experience, our social location, and our pre-existing health and mental health conditions — how any of us experiences grief, for example, will be shaped by our particular circumstances, so it's worth not assuming your climate grief is the same as the next person's, and allowing room for those differences.

5. Feeling together matters, and it helps to make space for it — sharing feelings together, even through something as small as a mini word cloud, helps us feel more connected.

6. Listening without fixing — in workshops or climate cafés — helps people work through their own questions and dilemmas more clearly, rather than someone immediately jumping in with "have you thought about this" or "here's how I manage it."

I'll pop some resources in the chat about where to go next — for self-care, and also for finding a climate café; we also run "Nourish" sessions for people in the nature and climate movement. There's one on tomorrow, and another in November. You can also become a PSC member if this topic interests you and you'd like to be more involved in the conversation around climate and mental health.

Closing Q&A

Guest (Janet): I wonder if you could speak to whether there's published, peer-reviewed work on the mental health impacts of climate change that we could quote or refer to in our campaigning?

Beth Hill: Yes — plenty, especially over the last three or four years; it's absolutely bloomed. It's interesting, because when I did my own PhD on this back around 2015, there was almost nothing — it was genuinely hard to find credible sources to draw on. Now it's everywhere, and I'm very happy to share what I've got — I'll email it through to you after this, and hopefully that'll be useful for your campaigning too.

Guest (Janet): That would be fantastic, thank you very much.

Host (Sharee): Wonderful — thank you so much, Beth, that was really powerful. I think it'd be worth linking to some of these resources on our website and social media, to bring this to the fore. I'd also like to thank people like Des, and others, who've been onto this space since we started — some of us are slower learners!

Beth Hill: Thanks for having me. I'll head off now and let you get on with the rest of your meeting — keep in touch. It's always inspiring for me just to see this many faces on the screen — people passionate enough to turn up on a Monday night to do this work. So thank you for everything.

Resources Beth shared with us: 

• Slides from the presentation

• 9 Waypoints: The Climate Journey. A framework for navigating the emotional ups and downs of climate engagement 

• Climate Emotions Wheel: A taxonomy for naming the tangle of feelings that climate change can stir up.

• Climate Cafes: Monthly climate and emotions sharing groups - 

• Nourish Sessions: Every two months, for those working and volunteering in the climate space there are