Teaching for Sustainability: Climate Anxiety and Eco-Emotions

Beskrivning

The educational sector has a pivotal role to play in addressing the sustainability crises we are facing by, inter alia, providing students with knowledge, skills, and competence development. As educators, how can we share information about sustainability crises including climate change and discuss the seriousness of these crises, while also providing support to deal with the emotional responses that may arise? How can we support each other in this endeavour and reduce the risk of feeling overwhelmed, emotionally drained, or numb?

Climate anxiety is a combination of feelings that someone can experience when having concerns about climate change and the state of the planet. Climate anxiety is sometimes used as a concept to capture different emotional responses to sustainability crises in general. In addition to anxiety, being confronted with any sustainability crisis can give rise to different emotional responses, including anger, fear, guilt, and sadness. While emotional responses can cause great suffering, they can also be a productive force and indicate issues of importance, crossed boundaries, unmet needs, or personal values, all of which can provide us a direction to work towards individually and collaboratively.

Content and presenters:
- We talked about emotional responses to sustainability crises including what climate anxiety is and how it differs from other types of anxiety.
- We learnt about the latest research and practice within climate anxiety/eco-emotions including different approaches to deal with climate anxiety/eco-emotions.
We discussed how to provide space for students to deal with their emotional responses and what support educators as well as the university can provide.
Learn about available resources and discuss needs and wishes.

We invited two experts on eco-emotions – Panu P. Pihkala (University of Helsinki) and Marlis Wullenkord (Lund University) – to share their knowledge and experiences. In addition, three Lund University units that are dealing with climate anxiety/eco-emotions in different ways also presented their work, experiences, and reflections – the Student Health Centre, the Occupational Health Service, and Medvetenskapens hus.

The seminar mixed presentations with discussions and more interactive parts.

Period	2023 sep. 27
Typ av evenemang	Seminarium
Plats	Lund, SverigeVisa på karta