Climate Mental Health
Learn strategies to help students process climate-related emotions, build resilience, and inspire positive action and emotional well-being with CEEE's climate mental health resources.
In response to the climate crisis, many around the world, especially young people, have reported feeling overwhelmed, powerless, sad, and anxious. How can we teach these topics without overwhelming our students or causing anxiety? How do we support youth in stepping up rather than shutting down?
CEEE has compiled a collection of climate mental health resources, including curriculum, videos, and websites, offering strategies for processing climate change-related emotions and inspiring hope. The resources below combine trauma-informed approaches, mental health support, and solution-focused activities to inspire positive action and emotional well-being. By addressing climate-related emotions, they aim to transform anxiety and helplessness into a sense of hope and purpose, empowering students to take meaningful, solution-driven action for a more sustainable future.
The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) is a nationally renowned, award-winning, online clearinghouse that features; i) 700+ high-quality resources around climate and energy topics that are peer-reviewed for scientific accuracy, ii) pedagogic effectiveness and classroom readiness guidance for educators (“Toolkit”) and iii) is home to the vibrant CLEAN Network.
CLEAN offers a climate mental health toolkit, Beyond Gloom and Doom: How to Teach Climate Change Towards Empowerment, offering strategies and resources for processing climate change-related emotions, inspiring action together and hope for the future. The teaching resources include a curated collection of lesson plans, websites, and videos that support climate mental health with the goal of facilitating the expression, processing, and validation of youths' climate emotions while also encouraging positive emotions and reducing stress.
We include curriculum resources and videos from CLEAN's climate mental health toolkit below and you can access the resource collection in its entirety on the CLEAN website (mental health toolkit).
The Hazard Education, Awareness, and Resilience Task Force (HEART Force) is an award-winning collaborative project implemented by the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and Climate Adaptation Partnership (CAP) partner Western Water Assessment that engages rural Colorado middle and high school students, teachers, and communities to take proactive steps in preparing for and responding to natural hazards.
As students learn about in the HEART Force Program, resilience, or the capacity to successfully recover from difficulties, is important in helping communities recover after a natural disaster. Resiliency at the individual level, however, is also important; Resiliency helps overcome and heal from trauma. HEART Force provides the collection: Trauma-Informed Practices & Mental Health Strategies to Foster Hope and Resilience to assist educators in framing units and lessons about natural hazards within a trauma-informed and hopeful approach. The collection includes a trauma-informed practices guide, HEART Force lesson plans that encourage a hopeful community vision and solution-oriented actions, and more resources from a variety of sources on climate mental health.
We include curriculum resources and videos from HEART Force's trauma-informed practices and mental health strategies collection below and you can access the resource collection in its entirety here.
