Climate Cares: Building Youth Resilience by Understanding and Intervening on the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Awareness

Update ：March-2025

Understanding and Intervening on the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Awareness, working with young people in Australia, Trinidad and the Philippines.

Interview with Dr Emma Lawrance

The climate crisis is a mental health crisis.

The 2024 Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health concluded that the trend of rising rates of youth mental ill-health is entering a "dangerous phase", with global megatrends such as climate change a contributing cause. Young people are growing up in a rapidly changing world, where children born in 2020 will face two-seven fold increases in the number of extreme climate and weather events than their grandparents. Awareness of the severity of the planetary crisis and the power and generational inequity fueling it, can come with understandable strong psychological responses such as fear, anger, despair and worry, that without appropriate support can lead to higher psychological distress and poorer mental health outcomes.

While an explosion of literature in the last few years has documented youth distress in the face of the climate crisis, this has almost always been done using survey studies, and there are big gaps in understanding how context and culture - including identity and direct experiences of climate change hazards - influences these experiences.

There is also very limited evidence of relevant supportive interventions to build agency and resilience that can protect mental health and enable young people to thrive in a challenging future, and limited data to understand what kinds of support would work best in different contexts.

Understanding and developing the needed interventions to build resilience

The AXA Fellowship of Dr Emma Lawrance at Imperial College aimed at addressing these challenges by working with young people in Australia, the Philippines and the UK to understand how the climate crisis is affecting them and what sort of support they want, and then test and evaluate such interventions.

The study is done in collaboration with young people, researchers and civil society groups in these different countries. The Young People's Advisory Groups (YPAG) named the study, 'Rising Faster than the Sea Levels: Elevating the experiences of climate-aware young people’, to ensure young people are not viewed as only vulnerable but also with sources of resilience and agency.

This project explores psychological responses to the awareness of the climate crisis and how cultural and socioeconomic contexts influence mental health and resilience.

The goal is to develop and test interventions to mitigate mental health challenges, ultimately fostering stronger, more resilient young people.

Tell us about your original approach

“A mixed methods approach is being used to conduct focus group discussions and surveys - currently running - in Australia and the Philippines. Based on the advice and desires of the young advisors we trained hem to co-facilitate these group discussions to ensure a youth-friendly environment and build their capacities.

After my research identified a gap with robust evaluation of emerging support tools for young people - often run by civil society organisations - we have worked with The Resilience Project to evaluate the support they provide to both their Circle leads and participants as part of their ten-week peer-based intervention.

We used a combination of focus groups, surveys, journalling and audio diaries to gather inputs 'in real time' as the participants went through the experience, to measure outcomes such as climate anxiety, burnout risk, mental health, resilience, leadership, climate agency, and climate-related emotions”.

Preliminary findings indicate that participants valued the supportive community and safe environment, which helped manage climate-related emotions and well-being. However, there is a need for more tailored resources to ensure inclusivity.

 In the words of one of the Resilience Circle participants: “The programme was a transformative experience, providing not just tools for resilience but also a supportive community that made the journey deeply meaningful. I would recommend [it] to anyone looking to navigate eco-anxiety or develop resilience in a rapidly changing world.  Thank you for creating such an impactful initiative—it has left a lasting impression and provided me with skills and perspectives I will carry forward. “

"We aim to adapt features of the peer-led intervention for the Australian and Philippine contexts.

I am working with young people to finalise a guided journal intervention that will be published this year by Cambridge University Press.

I am also beginning to work with partners in Australia, WHO and UNEP to develop improved metrics to appropriately measure mental health impacts of climate awareness and experience.”

How do you ensure findings translate into real-world impact?

“I am working with policy makers to ensure that.

This includes having spoken with Australian policy makers - such as the South Australian Premier and Climate Change Ambassador, and the Australian Academy of Sciences - and forming connections with Filipino policy experts and practitioners including through my recent presentation at the Global Mental Health in Asia conference, with a whole day focused on climate and mental health.

I am also convening UK policymakers across departments at regular meetings to explore cross-sector opportunities to act on and integrate this work, including senior civil servants across Treasury and departments covering health, energy, social care, education, climate change, environment, food and justice.

I have shared this work as case studies to both the UK Health Security Agency and the WHO European Region, and am seeing growing desire and action to integrate mental health and climate policies and practice on the back of my extensive awareness raising.
I have been invited to present my research in diverse international fora, including at the World Economic Forum, World Congress of Psychiatry, several talks at the UNFCCC COP29 conference (including with the World Health Organisation), and the Planetary Health Alliance Annual Meeting.

My article in The Conversation, 'What I learned about eco-anxiety after listening to the climate stories of 1,000 people from around the world', has been read over 21,000 times. I was also invited to write a 'News and Views' piece for Nature Climate Change on youth mental health in the context of global crises, and recently been invited to write for World Psychiatry, a leading journal in the field. At the start of my Fellowship I also worked with young people on the Young People's Research and Action Agenda for climate change and mental health."

And next ?

“Our review article on climate psychology concepts like 'eco-anxiety' is under review as the introduction to the 'eco-anxiety special issue' for the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Journal, where I am the guest editor. We will also be working with young people from Australia, the Philippines and the Caribbean to co-design and test relevant interventions based on what we are learning in the focus groups.

We are planning multiple points of contact to showcase to young people how the findings make real-world impacts through events, social media communication, and reports back to young people, informed by their desires."

For more information

Emma Lawrance Profile | Imperial College London

(5) Emma Lawrance | LinkedIn

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Original project presentation : April 2023

Higher temperatures, extreme weather events, and changing landscapes can cause overwhelming fear, sadness, and existential dread. This ‘climate distress’ is increasingly common in young people, yet the psychological effects of climate change are poorly understood, particularly in the Global South. AXA Fellow at Imperial College London, Dr Emma Lawrance, will investigate the interplay between climate distress, mental health and wellbeing, coping strategies, and ‘climate agency’ —the capacity to take climate action- in young people from the Philippines and Australia. These two regions are particularly threatened by climate change but have different resources, cultures, and socioeconomic contexts. Dr Lawrance will also develop, adapt and test interventions intended to boost climate adaptation capacity and reduce mental health burden with young people affected.

Some countries are at a greater risk of climate impacts yet have fewer resources to deal with those impacts. For example, the Philippines has some of the highest reported levels of climate distress but only 2-3 mental health workers per 100,000 people. Furthermore, cultural and exposure contexts could significantly affect how people are feeling and responding, and what opportunities exist to increase resilience. Without a proper understanding into how different cultures and communities experience the psychological effects of climate change, or whether psychological scales are applicable across different contexts, progress in the development of remedial strategies is barred. To address this, Dr Lawrance will conduct online surveys and interviews with young people in Australia and the Philippines.

Dr Lawrance will additionally examine the links between climate distress, psychological adaptation and coping skills, climate agency and action-taking, and mental health and wellbeing. Psychological adaptation includes processing the reality of the threats and developing helpful coping strategies to foster ‘mental resilience’—an ability to not only recover following adversity, but also hold the “capacity for transformation”. Building resilient communities will be crucial for people to cope with and act on the climate crisis, and manage the inevitable and required changes positively and proactively. Essentially, stronger communities help people to live well and cope through escalating climate impacts and engage in adapting their communities to limit the negative consequences. Resilience also involves increasing social and emotional capacity to engage with the wider societal transformations required to mitigate climate change now and into the future. In a second part of the project, Dr Lawrance will co-design, test, and compare two locally tailored youth interventions built to enhance resilience through opportunities to process climate-related emotions, bolster climate agency and develop helpful coping skills. The project will be conducted in partnership with researchers and youth organisations working locally, including Young People’s Advisory Groups, comprised of teams of local young people who will feed into all project aspects.

The first is a self-guided journal intervention, already piloted with over 40 young people in the United Kingdom using a series of relevant activities to help young people explore their emotions and values, imagine the future they want to see, and find their desired role in addressing this in their lives or communities. The second is a volunteer-led workshop based on relevant community-based approaches, such as those led by Force of Nature. Dr Lawrance will test how this community-based intervention might have added benefits for climate agency and mental health, and the value of different types of interventions for the young people involved.

The perceived inaction of leaders can understandably worsen climate anxiety in young people. Thus, including their voices in climate action discussions could increase young people’s climate agency. Dr Lawrance will work to elevate their voices to relevant decision makers, to become aware of their needs and appropriately involve them in local climate action.

This project will offer insights that will prove crucial for the development of much-needed interventions. Strategies that equip young people with the skills and motivation to transform their communities will simultaneously protect their mental health, thus unburdening mental health systems and avoiding the need for more costly interventions later on. The benefits uncovered for young people in Australia and the Philippines can be upscaled to different countries in future work. This, as well as strengthening international and community-based networks of researchers, climate organizations, young people, and policy makers, means that Dr Lawrance will set the stage for advancements that go well beyond the project’s 2 years.

April 2023