These strategies include volunteering, building a community, discussing emotions with others, practicing mindfulness, and seeking therapy.
The toolkit, which was developed by nursing experts at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, also offers reflection questions and a film with diverse voices for people to examine their values, emotions, and behaviors in relation to the environment.
Natania Abebe
“Many people have a hard time understanding the relationship between climate change and mental health and are experiencing high levels of stress about climate change,” Natania Abebe, MSN/MPH, RN, a registered nurse and graduate student at UBC who developed the toolkit, told this news organization.
“Youth, in particular, appear to have higher levels of consciousness regarding climate change because they’re the ones who are going to inherit the planet,” she said. “A big part of why they have mental health issues is that they feel trapped in sociopolitical structures that they didn’t agree to and didn’t necessarily create.”
The toolkit was published online on April 20.
Empowering agents for change
Ms. Abebe was inspired to create the toolkit after giving guest lectures on climate change and mental health as part of UBC’s Nursing 290 course. Her faculty advisor, Raluca Radu, MSN, a lecturer in the School of Nursing at UBC, developed the course in 2020 to teach students about the broad impacts of climate change on communities.
Raluca Radu
As the course has grown during the past 2 years, Ms. Abebe wanted to create a coping framework and engaging film for health educators to use with students, as well as for everyday people.
The toolkit includes contributions from three Canadian climate change experts, as well as six students from different backgrounds who have taken the course.
“I wanted to center the voices of youth and empower them to think they can be agents for change,” Ms. Abebe said. “I also wanted to highlight diverse voices and take a collaborative approach because climate change is such a big problem that we have to come together to address it.”
Ms. Abebe and Ms. Radu also noticed an increase in climate anxiety in recent years because of the pandemic, worldwide food and energy shortages, and extreme weather events that hit close to home, such as wildfires and floods in British Columbia.
“With the pandemic, people have been spending more time online and thinking about our world at large,” Ms. Abebe said. “At the same time that they’re thinking about it, climate change events are happening simultaneously – not in the future, but right now.”
Economic, social, and political shifts during the past 2 years have also prompted people to question standard practices and institutions, which has created an opportunity to discuss change, Ms. Radu told this news organization.
“It’s a pivotal time to question our values and highly consumerist society,” she said. “We’re at a point in time where, if we don’t take action, the planetary health will be in an irreversible state, and we won’t be able to turn back time and make changes.”