Ripple Research partners with Maastricht University for its Sustainability Week to deliver a workshop on climate anxiety and climate action
To mark the celebration of Earth Day in April, Ripple Research was invited by Maastricht University to host a workshop on our climate related research. Learn more about our trip!
To mark the celebration of Earth Day in April, Ripple Research was invited by Maastricht University in the Netherlands to host a workshop as part of their annual Sustainability Week.
Hosted in conjunction with the University’s Green Office and Klimaat Actie Netwerk, the week aimed to raise awareness about sustainable development for tens of thousands of students. It featured a range of lectures, workshops and panel discussions covering everything from sustainable business models and environmental law through to the challenges of ecocide and deciphering how we can encourage sustainable patterns of consumption.
Bo Braet, a representative from the Green Office commented that "Our goal is to promote sustainable practices and raise awareness about environmental issues, we hope to inspire individuals and businesses alike to make a positive impact."
On Thursday 20th April, we participated in the University’s Faculty of Science & Engineering Day to lead a workshop entitled: “Why It's Time to Rethink Climate Anxiety: New Research Challenges Old Assumptions.” This was an opportunity to present our extensive research conducted on the nexus between mental health and the climate emergency and our unique bottom-up social listening approach to this topic.
We designed our workshop to be digitally interactive, leaving room for enlightening discussions, whilst framing the problem through our active listening and published research.
Held on the campus’s sustainability hub, the session raised important topics, touching on the spectrum of climate-related emotions we’ve identified beyond anxiety, such as grief, guilt and anger.
We elaborated on why climate anxiety is not an isolated phenomenon but instead, an accumulation of compounding stressors such as the cost-of-living crisis, geo-political instabilities and COVID-19, which have all contributed to the burgeoning mental health crisis.
By presenting the existing solutions available to citizens such as the emerging field of climate psychology and mental health apps to help manage climate anxiety, we also led into how we can fill the gaps on these solutions and why it’s becoming increasingly urgent to do so.
We shared how Ripple is leveraging our insights to design a pragmatic solution for climate anxiety and stimulate action – namely a social experiment, Buoyant Project, a peer mentoring community that promotes mental health and well-being.
What we learnt
The workshop was created to be interactive, posing questions to the audience who could answer them digitally and remain anonymous. Here are some of the main takeaways from our discussion:
· Attendees came from a range of academic backgrounds including data science, policy, law and engineering. In this intimate session, they were willing to be open, be vulnerable and share their feelings. As mirrored in our online research, emotions and perceptions surrounding climate were mostly negative, with connotations of frustration and sadness.
· When rating how important climate change was, all attendees marked this as 5/5 – extremely important. But, when asked specifically about how anxious they feel about climate, this was less extreme, with an average rating of 3/5.
· We asked students to identify what exactly made them most anxious about climate. Answers included ‘facing ignorance’, as well as some who cited that the popular lifestyle focused on hyper-consumption seems increasingly hard to shift and change.
· How does climate impact the everyday lifestyle of attendees? We probed into if it impacted behaviours such as sleeping, leisure time, working as well as their relationships. Here, responses noted that it impacted relaxing time, and sometimes work. One attendee was a university researcher focused on the climate space and mentioned they found it hard to concentrate and sometimes felt overwhelmed. However, a number of responses commented that their climate anxiety was not severe enough to impact their everyday lives.
· Would students seek support to manage their climate anxiety? This was not a question many had considered prior to our session, however a few students commented they would turn to friends and family to talk things through, whilst others would be open to joining online communities to connect with likeminded individuals experiencing the same feelings and thoughts.
· Many thought-provoking questions arose during our workshop. Participants were sceptical about the progress being made to date to mitigate the climate emergency asking why nothing seems to be working? Others wanted to understand the barriers to climate action at a micro level. This coincided with the presentation of Ripple’s climate change behaviour model and the flywheel of hope which sparked much interest, with suggestions to incorporate new elements, borrowed from the likes of Project Drawdown to build on the action stage of the model. We were grateful for such inputs.
Our time with the students at Maastricht University was invaluable to gain an on-the-ground perspective on climate anxiety and climate action to colour Ripple’s existing research and active listening. We wish to thank the University and its student communities for their invitation.
Interested in this topic? Check out our work on climate anxiety and listen to our Managing Director Ravi Sreenath discuss these issues on the Communicating Climate Change podcast.