The importance of finding a climate-aware therapist or coach

And: is therapy even up to the challenges of the metacrisis?

Things aren’t looking good — the UN announced last week that the world is on track for 3 degrees (Celsius) of warming this century without “relentless emissions cuts”, which seem unlikely. 3 degrees was previously described as an almost worst-case disaster scenario that we had to avoid at all costs : it means uncontrollable sea level rise, extreme weather events, over a billion people displaced, an increase in famine, disease and poverty. And this isn’t some imaginary future scenario — it’s happening now: in Spain, in the USA, in Nepal — with more and more extreme “once in 100 year” weather events happening all the time.

It’s not just climate, of course — it can feel as if the world is spiralling into collapse on all fronts: social, political, economic, even emotional. Many people call this convergence of crises — which of course all feed into and exacerbate each other — the metacrisis or polycrisis.

So, how do people feel about this generally? Obviously, not great.

The People’s Climate Vote, the world’s largest standalone public opinion survey on climate change done so far (2024), found that 69% of people said that climate change is impacting their future decisions, while 54% of people said they’re more worried about it than they were a year ago.

Over the last few years, a few new words have been coined to describe our emotional reaction to fears…