Blair Nelsen

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Lilian Barraclough holds a Master of Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University and is a long-time youth climate justice advocate. She will speak to the experiences of politically active youth with climate grief by identifying vocabularies describing climate grief, rituals used to process it, motivations for political action, and how grief and activism influence each other. She will share interview results and art created by participants in reflection on their climate grief.

Abhay Singh Sachal is a National Scholar at the University of Toronto, and the Founder and Executive Director of Break The Divide Foundation. Break The Divide is an international non-profit organization that connects youth worldwide to break down divisions between communities

João Vasconcelos is a Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Lisbon. He is the coordinator of the IN-HALE project which aims to identify the summer thermal conditions inside the homes of residents aged 65+ and to identify the individual determinants of heat exposure as well as the barriers to thermal adaptation.

Matt Treble is a graduate student at Athabasca University completing his Masters of Counselling degree. He currently works as a Youth Mental Health Counsellor at two non-profit organizations in Victoria, British Columbia.

Zachary is a registered nurse and has worked in child and adolescent mental health. He is currently completing a PhD in Nursing, at the University of British Columbia School of Nursing, where he is studying the impacts of climate change on mental health in Canada, with a focus on youth. In addition to his interest in participatory approaches, he plans to make use of strength-based approaches to mental health as well as the concept of mental health promotion in his doctoral research.

Susan Bodnar, a New York City-based clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, is guest editing an issue of Ecopsychology on ecotherapy. Her research examines our relationships to our environment through an object-relations lens. In this time of climate change, she believes a better understanding of our relationship to our environment can lead to better mental health policy.

Judy is a first-year PhD student in the Faculty of Health Sciences at SFU. Under the supervision of Dr. Hasina Samji, Judy uses data from the Youth Development Instrument (YDI) survey to better understand the effect of the climate and ecological crises on youth within British Columbia. By identifying predictive and associated factors with youth eco-anxiety, she eventually hopes to use her findings to develop support resources to help young people cope.

Terra Léger-Goodes is a PhD student at the University of Quebec in Montréal. She is particularly interested in the psychological impacts of human-driven climate change on people of all ages. She works with the organization Eco-Motion to provide community mental health resources to support people coping with eco-anxiety. Her focus is to empower individuals to promote collective action.

Alison Stapleton is a Researcher at Smithfield Clinic and Lecturer in Psychology at Maynooth University and Dublin Business School, Ireland. We outline ways to change consumers' behaviors: establish credibility and deliver appropriate consequences, while also increasing target audiences’ perceived self-efficacy and tapping into what consumers care about; facilitating change by appealing to appetites (i.e., values) rather than adding aversives (i.e., penalties).

Kalysha Closson is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego, and Researcher in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Closson is passionate about community-based research (CBR) and as a member of the MHCCA, she is leading CBR efforts to develop, test, and monitor climate change distress and resilience across Canada.

Marc Reyes is a Professor at the University of Santo Tomas Psychology Department, nd the Immediate Past President of the Psychological Association of the Philippines. He will discuss how climate change impacts youth in the Philippines and the efforts that his team is working on to address this mounting issue among Gen Z Filipinos.

Andreea is an MHCCA Co-Founder and researcher, Co-Chair of the MHCCA 2023 Summit, and a PhD student at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. Her work explores the psychosocial and mental health impacts of climate change. She will be discussing efforts to develop, test, and monitor climate change distress and resilience across Canada.

Urooj Raja is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University in Chicago. She will be presenting the results of assessing life story interviews with climate change professionals and activists will be discussed. What are some of the reasons why these individuals chose to become engaged, and what are some of the challenges they face? Implications and new related research will also be discussed.

Arden Henley is the Executive Director of the Green Technology Education Centre, an organization aims to be at the forefront of solutions to the social and environmental challenges of our time. He will be discussing The question that future generations will ask is, such as “How could you have known so much and done so little?”. Notes from the Frontline will examine the differential impacts of this crisis on the states of minds and relationships of people and propose that the less than urgent response to this crisis is a reflection of profound social, emotional and spiritual problems in society.

Rita Trombin is an Environmental Psychologist affiliated with the University of Verona, Italy. Her work is centered around promoting the human bond with nature (biophilia), which is key to sustainable behavior. Daily nature intake is essential for healthy, happy, and thriving communities. How many people are aware of it? The presentation will show the work of Rita and her team on the occasion of a public event in Milan, where citizens received a personalized nature prescription to be able to maximize nature benefits.

Tim Takaro is a Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and a physician-scientist trained in occupational and environmental medicine, public health, and toxicology. He is a highly influential climate activist, and his current work primarily focuses on the health impacts of climate change.

Aynsley Klassen is an MSc student at the Lakehead University. Her presentation focuses on the lived experiences of climate change and climate action for youth climate champions in Northern Ontario. Two thematic networks, climate emotions and motivations and supports for youth climate action will be explored and two recommendations are offered for health and education spaces. Aynsley undertook this research as a mother and a climate activist living in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Stylianos Syropoulos is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Boston College in the US. He believes that a personal legacy is an individual's attempt to positively influence the lives of future generations. He will present a series of studies that examine the different motivations behind individuals' legacy concerns, and the impacts of these motivations on pro-environmental/ sustainable behaviors and individuals' mental health.

Nessa is working on a PhD in developmental psychology at UQAM. Her research focuses on the determinants of eco-anxiety and the civic engagement of high school students. Nessa and her colleagues will discuss the importance of creating spaces for communities to talk about how climate change is affecting their wellbeing. Through an exploratory case study of the nonprofit Eco-Motion, they will highlight relevant and adapted approaches that seem to best respond to eco-anxiety in diverse communities.

Sage Palmedo is a medical student at Dartmouth College in the US. Our species’ disconnection from Earth and from one another is at the core of the climate crisis and the corresponding mental health crisis. There is a critical need for both 1) a sensory understanding of the environment that we take space in, and 2) storytelling that is in resonance with this sensory understanding. With guided sound meditations, Sage and her team bring these two ideas to the forefront, nourishing mental health through feeling intelligence.