Self-Help Guides and Toolkits

Empowering yourself with tools for managing eco-anxiety and faciliating mental health aware conversations about climate change can foster a sense of agency and hope in the face of daunting climate realities. These guides and toolkits provide practical ideas to help you build emotional resilience on your own schedule.

Climate Reactions Self-Assessment Tool

Our Climate Reactions Self-Assessment Tool (also known as the Climate-related Ecological Distress and Resilience Scale [CEDAR]) was developed by researchers at Simon Fraser University.

Recognizing Unhelpful Thinking: A Tool for Navigating Climate Distress

A practical guide to recognizing and reframing cognitive distortions that fuel climate anxiety, helping individuals manage emotional distress and maintain effective engagement with climate issues.

Techniques for Grounding and Presencing: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Mindful Connection

A curated set of grounding and presencing techniques to support emotional resilience, mindfulness, and connection in the face of stress, trauma, and climate-related distress.

Therapeutic Approaches for Post-Disaster Mental Health Recovery and Resilience

A series of trauma-informed, culturally adaptable therapeutic guides to support emotional recovery and resilience after climate-related disasters, tailored for use by professionals, peers, and community helpers across different phases of post-disaster care.

Building Climate Resilient Neighbourhoods: Resources and Guidance for Readiness and Resilience

A comprehensive guide to building climate-resilient neighbourhoods through community-based action that enhances preparedness, strengthens social connection, and promotes mental well-being in the face of climate-related risks.

Building Resilience in a Changing Climate: A Self-Help Guide for Climate Distress

This workbook is designed to guide you on a journey from climate-related distress toward emotional resilience, empowered action, and meaningful connection.

Climate Advocacy & Mental Health: A Youth Guide to Effective Action

A practical, youth-focused guide that equips young climate advocates with tools to care for their mental health, build emotional resilience, communicate effectively, and sustain motivation through collective action.

Sharing Climate Narratives

A guide to climate storytelling that empowers individuals to share personal, trauma-informed, and emotionally resonant narratives that foster connection, inclusivity, hope, and action in the face of the climate crisis.

Speaking to Others' Climate Values

A guide to having more effective climate conversations by identifying and connecting with the personal values of others—such as compassion, justice, freedom, tradition, or practicality—in order to foster understanding, reduce resistance, and inspire meaningful climate action.

Knowing The Do's And Dont's of Climate Conversations

A practical guide to navigating climate conversations with empathy and clarity by outlining key do’s and don’ts—such as validating emotions, focusing on solutions, avoiding blame, using clear language, promoting empowerment, and supporting mental health—to foster constructive, hopeful dialogue that motivates action.

How to Use Active Listening in Climate Conversations

A practical guide to using active listening in climate conversations—offering step-by-step tools to foster empathy, emotional support, and meaningful dialogue that helps people feel heard, connected, and empowered in the face of climate distress.

Responding to Common Questions About Climate Change

A conversational guide to responding to common questions and misconceptions about climate change with empathy, scientific clarity, and relatable examples—helping build understanding, reduce skepticism, and inspire informed, constructive dialogue.

Supporting Others’ Through Their Climate Emotions

A compassionate, practical guide for supporting others through climate-related emotions—offering trauma-informed tools to help loved ones process anxiety, grief, anger, guilt, and helplessness with empathy, patience, and emotionally safe conversations.

When to Have Climate Conversations

A guide to recognizing key moments when climate emotions surface (such as during extreme weather, news events, family gatherings, or health crises) and using these opportunities to initiate compassionate, supportive conversations that foster connection, resilience, and hope.

Conversation Starters for Talking about Climate Change

This guide offers practical, empathetic strategies for initiating everyday conversations about climate change and mental health. The guide focuses on breaking “climate silence” through curiosity, vulnerability, and connection in contexts like weather, news, travel, classrooms, clinics, and workplaces to foster emotional resilience and collective hope.

Reliable Sources for Climate Information: Why They Matter and What They Are

A comprehensive guide to why accurate climate information matters in a post-truth world—highlighting how trustworthy science builds public trust, informs effective action, empowers communities, and helps counter misinformation to ensure a just and sustainable future.

Climate Doom to Messy Hope: Climate Healing & Resilience: A Practical Handbook for Climate Educators and Community

This theory-to-practice handbook is grounded in a commitment to fostering deeper understandings and connections to how we can support mindful and proactive navigation of magnifying climate change impacts on individual and community mental health and wellbeing.

Exploring Climate Change and Mental Health 

This toolkit is designed for use by educators to empower students to think critically about the structural and socio-political inequities that affect them while centering climate change and mental health through embedded reflective exercises.

Hold This Space

This digital tool helps users process difficult emotions, imagine a better future, and learn more about the impact of collective climate action. Hold this space is designed for young adults and provides a self-guided journey that aims to restore hope, agency, and ambition towards a sustainable future.

Climate Wellbeing Resource Kit by The UBC Climate Hub

This 15-page toolkit guides readers through a multi-step process for understanding their values, emotions, and behaviours related to climate change and the environment.

Coping with Climate Distress Booklet by The Australian Psychological Society

This 12-page overview of strategies for coping with climate distress covers behavioural, relational, cognitive, and emotional coping strategies for managing your feelings about climate change.

The Climate Change Empowerment Handbook by the Australian Psychological Society

This 39-page handbook provides psychological strategies to tackle climate change.

Climate Journal Project

A guided journaling initiative that creates a space for people to cope with eco-anxieties and move past paralysis into action, using reflective prompts to build emotional resilience​

Emotional Resilience Toolkit for Climate Work

A handbook designed to provide emotional support, resources, and tools for eco-anxiety, grief, and the range of feelings that accompany climate work