Healthy mind — healthy planet?
Global Goals Jam 2020 helped us start the conversation.
The connection between mental health and climate change isn’t one you hear about often (yet), as the scope of the intersectionality of the societal challenges isn’t always on our radar. Nevertheless, it’s an incredibly important subject.
Mental wellness and climate change closely affect each other. On one side, climate change is amplifying the destructive effects of stress –– induced by a natural disaster, forced displacement, health issues, food scarcity or the break down of the community ties. From another side — and that’s the one discussed the least — a low global mental wellness level means that developing mental resilience will be that much harder and the global mental capacity to tackle challenges on this scale will remain low.
All change begins from us. We aren’t capable of internalizing new, more sustainable, more considerate habits when our minds are unwell. That’s why it’s essential to start paying attention to the role of our wellness in the bigger picture.
The most recent opportunity to start the conversation around the subject reached us through Global Goals Jam Berlin, a two-day hackathon dedicated to developing far-reaching, sustainable solutions that would get us closer to the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) during the upcoming decade. The event is led by Nadim Choucair, the founder of the 2030 Cabinet, who is tirelessly working to establish the sustainability ecosystem with the goal of advancing the efforts needed to reach the SDGs by 2030.
So when he invited us to contribute, we couldn’t help being thrilled about becoming a part of the Global Goals Jam project. We worked with Nadim to develop one of the challenges the teams were tackling during the hackathon — it seemed like a great chance to bring the intersection of mental wellness and climate change into the conversation. While the topic can be approached from various perspectives and therefore can be tricky to grasp in such a short time, the team did wonderfully well.
They came up with an idea of “Climate Emotions”, an organization that’s meant to enable people to develop healthy and sustainable habits applicable in their daily lives. “Climate Emotions” would offer a 3–4 day workshop where people could begin learning the habits of sustainable consumption and mental wellbeing. The skills they’d get a foundation of in the workshop could be further developed on their own time, helping the participants to improve their relationships, mental wellness and become more mindful consumers.
Projects and ideas like this connect what we do for the sake of our wellbeing and what we do for society — while we’re also a part of society and its problems concern us, the gap between the two can still exist. When it comes to climate change, we’re well into the climate crisis and delaying the action means irreversible consequences for us and the generations to come. However, as Maya, the team leader for the mental health & climate change challenge in the Global Goals Jam, noted, many individuals feel helpless and frustrated, not knowing how or if they can help.
Individual effort can seem very insignificant in the shadow of a global disaster. Nevertheless, while systemic action is the force of change, our decisions matter too. Aligning individual habits to match one’s beliefs takes action for change to a deeper level, not to mention that large-scale individual activity can have groundbreaking results. But to be able to shift towards a more sustainable lifestyle, we have to care about our wellbeing first as we are the force for change — which can either be weak or unstoppable. Once the means and the tools are there, we can achieve anything we dream of.
The Global Goals Jam Berlin 2020 is organized by 2030 Cabinet, powered by SDG-Investments and with support from UnternehmensGrün and Engagement Global.
Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
