CLIMATE RESILIENCE

empowering individuals, organizations, and communities to build resilience so they can thrive in a climate-changing world

Who We Serve

Nearly everyone is at risk from climate distress and many feel the psychological impacts of climate change today. Those numbers will only rise in the future. We are here to serve all, but especially those most at risk from the mental and emotional health impacts of climate change, particularly whose work involves climate change, such as scientists, regulators, lawyers, activists, and more.

Characteristics of the Climate Problem

We recognize that the effects of climate distress are:

  • Disproportionate: The psychological effects of the climate crisis are not distributed equally, but affect most significantly the young, the old, people of color, poor, and the natural world.

  • Inequitable: Those most responsible for the climate crisis are most insulated from its effects and least likely to be aware of its impacts, and vice versa.

  • Symptomatic: Climate change is a symptom of deeper, underlying problems associated with deeply held cultural narratives, norms, and values.

  • Universal: Every person, organization, and community is impacted by climate distress.

  • Urgent: Just as as there is a window of time in which we must take action to halt and reverse climate-forcing emissions, a time window also exists for implementing the social changes necessary to avert the worst climate outcomes before deteriorating social, economic, political, and psychological conditions make the necessary changes impossible.

Principles of Climate Resilience

Therefore, we believe that an effective response to the climate crisis must be:

  • Integrative: Climate resilience increases integration, coherence, and connection within and between the individual and the nested systems it inhabits (e.g., body + mind, individual + organization).

  • Adaptive: Climate disruption is fundamentally a message that we must do things differently, and climate resilience emerges from the ongoing conversation between each of us and the natural and human systems we inhabit.

  • Systemic: Responsibility for building capacity for climate resilience applies at and across all levels of social organization: individual, family, organization, community, and society.

  • Preventative: Efforts to build capacity for climate resilience must begin on a large scale long before acute climate impacts (e.g., fire, flood, storm, drought) are broadly felt.

  • Transformative: Rather than enabling individuals and systems merely to recover from climate disruption, true climate resilience empowers individuals, organizations, and communities to create even greater health and well-being than they experienced before.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Emergent Resilience values diversity in all its forms and commits to actively building a community that is diverse across many dimensions, including race, sex, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, ability, culture, nationality, socioeconomic status, occupational status, education, life experience, religion, political opinion, and level of comfort and experience with resilience-related concepts and practices.

We have adopted the Anti Racist Small Business Pledge and are committed to identifying, minimizing, and removing barriers to participation in our programs. We are in the process of developing a more comprehensive policy statement and action plan to guide our efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will post this policy as soon as it is finalized.

Learn about our team dedicated to building resilience here: