Tagged With "Climate Science For Our World"
Blog Post
The Environmental Burden of Generation Z [washingtonpost.com]
By Jason Plautz, The Washington Post Magazine, February 3, 2020 The teenagers pour off buses near Denver’s Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and there’s a festive feeling in the air. But this is no festival. The message these young people have come to send to their city, to their state, to the nation — to the world...
Blog Post
The Ocean Is Suffocating, and It's Our Fault (livescience.com)
Ocean "dead zones" — regions of the sea where oxygen is severely or entirely depleted and most forms of life can't survive — are becoming more numerous, and scientists warn that they will continue to increase unless we curb the factors driving global climate change, which is fueling this alarming shift in ocean chemistry. This sobering view of the "suffocating" ocean was described in a new study, published online today (Jan. 4) in the journal Science . The study is the first to present such...
Blog Post
The Promise of Post-Traumatic Growth Part II
Read "The Promise of Post-Traumatic Growth Part I" here . What do you imagine post-traumatic growth looks like? Feeling stronger in the face of a new challenge, knowing we’ve already overcome the worst that life can throw at us? Being more grateful for the little things? More connected to our friends and family? Finding new perspective and priorities? Or maybe having a deeper sense of the mystery and sanctity of life? The answer is all of the above. In the first part of our article “ The...
Blog Post
The White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here’s Why (yesmagazine.org)
Finally, plant species have rights , too. Manoomin (“wild rice”) now has legal rights. At the close of 2018, the White Earth band of Ojibwe passed a law formally recognizing the Rights of Manoomin. According to a resolution, these rights were recognized because “it has become necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and fresh water resources as part of our primary treaty foods for future generations.” This reflects traditional laws of Anishinaabe people, now codified by the...
Blog Post
This is what our cities need to do to be truly liveable for all [theconversation.com]
Urban planners, governments and developers are increasingly interested in making cities “liveable”. But what features contribute to liveability? Which areas in cities are the least and most liveable? The various liveability rankings – where Australia tends to do quite well – don’t provide much useful guidance. In a recently released report, Creating Liveable Cities in Australia , our team defined and produced the first baseline measure of liveability in Australia’s capital cities. We broke...
Blog Post
Tomorrow's Doctors Will Diagnose the Mental Toll of Climate Change
The Daily Dose, July 22, 2019 by Carly Stern https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/tomorrows-doctors-will-diagnose-the-mental-toll-of-climate-change/95540 First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored...
Blog Post
Trial by Fire: MARC Sites Collaborate on Trauma-Informed Disaster Response
By @Anndee Hochman During a December 2017 convening in Philadelphia, several leaders from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) realized they had more in common than a passion for building resilience in their communities. They all hailed from places that had recently been scorched or flooded by natural disasters: wildfires in California and the Columbia River Gorge, hurricanes in Florida, the lingering residue of 2012’s post-tropical cyclone Sandy in the Northeast.
Blog Post
UC Berkeley Event: Climate Climate Change: The Defining Health Challenge and Opportunity of the 21st Century
This coming Wednesday, The Lancet Countdown will release its first annual report tracking climate change and health indicators across five key domains (including Mental Health) on November 1 ( live in Berkeley , or via Livestream ). (Report attached below.) All of the speakers could and should be invited to the upcoming California Preparing Individuals for Climate Change Conference. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend. Climate Change: The Defining Health Challenge and Opportunity of the...
Blog Post
Update on ITRC Activities Since January 1, 2018
Below is a summary of what the ITRC has been up to in the past few months: 1. Conference on Preparing People for Climate Change In California After a slow start on registrations, the Jan 24-25 conference in Oakland ended up being sold out. On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being excellent and 1 being poor), the 95 evaluations we received (out of 140 attendees) average out at 4.65, which we consider to be excellent. Two people said the conference changed their lives (one emailed afterwards to say...
Blog Post
Using the Climate Crisis as Catalyst to Increase Wellbeing
I wrote this article for Meeting of the Minds, which brings urban leaders together. It explains the recommendations of the ITRC for using the climate crisis as a transformational catalyst to enhance personal, social, and ecological wellbeing. Found here: https://meetingoftheminds.org/building-transformational-resilience-to-cope-with-climate-disruption-28559 A year after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, many residents continue to struggle with mental illness. One suicide...
Blog Post
Webinar: Building Resilient Communities with Elaine Miller-Karas
This webinar will explore integrating a biological based model to reduce the impacts of toxic stress for children and adults. It is a model both for prevention and to use in the aftermath of adverse event.
Blog Post
Webinar: Building Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses
Live Webinar: Building Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses Monday, October 28 th , 2019 12:00-1:30 PM PDT You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming...
Blog Post
Webinar Slides and Recording: The Human Impact of Climate Change
Recorded live November 13, 2019. Find the slides attached below. Speaker: Elaine Miller-Karas, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director and Co-founder, Trauma Resource Institute. Guest: Kelly Doty, MA, Strengthening Families Program Manager, Youth for Change Host: Carey Sipp, Southeast Community Facilitator, ACEs Connection. Climate change emergencies are real and the human toll during and in the aftermath impact children, teens and adults. This webinar will hear from Kelly Doty, a survivor, who lost...
Blog Post
Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
Blog Post
Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
Blog Post
Why Focus on Resilience? 2019 BPT Conference Big Idea Session with Teri Barila
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” -Desmond Tutu. This quote captures the essence of why resilience matters. To Community Resilience Initiative, Resilience is not about “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” or “bouncing back” from serious harm or injury. To us, Resilience is about self-discovery and self-awareness based on what the ACE Study, neurobiology, and epigenetics tell us...
Blog Post
Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative: Help for Those Recovering From The Devastating Fires of 2017 [sonomacountygazette.com]
By Sonoma County Gazette, October 22, 2019 As we reach the second anniversary of the 2017 wildfires, the triggers for those impacted have become more visible: reconstruction challenges, the Camp Fires in Butte County or just a windy night are a few examples. Mental health recovery and resiliency are more important than ever. Our community is really starting to see the long-term effects of wildfire trauma and PTSD on the mental health of our employees, neighbors and customers. Prolonged...
Blog Post
A New Report Links Climate Change, The Arab Spring, and Mass Migration [psmag.com]
A new report from the University of East Anglia in England is the first to offer an empirically established causal path from climate change to conflict to cross-border migration. The report analyzes data from 157 countries between 2006 and 2015. While it didn't find an overall causal relationship between climate change, conflict, and migration across the world during that time period, it pinpoints a particular area and time period where it had a profound impact: countries affected by the...
Blog Post
A place called home: A year after the Tubbs Fire, displaced families can finally look ahead [SF Chronicle]
About this series: One year ago, more than a dozen fires shot to life in the North Bay. One of them, the Tubbs Fire, would become the most destructive wildfire in California history. In the year since, The Chronicle’s Lizzie Johnson has spent hundreds of hours with two couples to report this series, witnessing some of the most intimate, heartbreaking and joyous moments as they rebuilt their lives California was on fire again. Through this past summer, blazes raged across the state. They...
Blog Post
ACEs Science 101 (FAQs)
What are ACEs? ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children's developing brains so profoundly that the effects show up decades later; they cause much of chronic disease, most mental illness, and are at the root of most violence. ...
Blog Post
Addressing Mental Health in a Changing Climate: Incorporating Mental Health Indicators into Climate Change and Health Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessments
Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5T 3M7, Canada Published: 22 August 2018 Abstract A growing number of health authorities around the world are conducting climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments; however, few explore impacts and adaptations related to mental health. We argue for an expanded conceptualization of health that includes both the physiological and psychological aspects of climate change and health. Through a review...
Blog Post
Announcing CRI's Newest Trainings- July and September!
CRI is excited to announce new trainings! We will have online trainings in July, and an in-person training in September. July Online Trainings CRI Course 1 LIVE WEBCAST: Trauma-Informed Training A dynamic 2 part six-hour LIVE WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into...
Blog Post
Article shows how climate change can generate harmful psychosocial maladies
This article underscores how, left unaddressed, climate change can quickly become a psychosocial malady and why we must think in much broader terms than merely mental health (psychological) problems. Traumatized and fearful people often retreat into a self-protective survival mode that leads them to believe/support authoritarians who say they can fix the problem. Bob Doppelt Climate Kings: How a new generation of authoritarian leaders are using climate change to seize power By Samuel Miller...
Blog Post
Bill to address resilience education and skills training in response to climate change advances in Oregon
As reported earlier by ACEs Connection , the Oregon legislature is considering a bill, S. 1037, to establish a Transformational Resilience Task Force to make transformational resilience education and skills-training available to all Oregonians by 2025. Under the bill, an 18-member task force would be created to study aspects of psychological, emotional, and psychosocial resilience education and skills training. r to l Bob Doppelt, David Pollak, Mandy Davis Oregon members of the International...
Blog Post
Books Inspiring Us: Being the Change [yesmagazine.org]
It can be hard to find hope in climate change mitigation. But that’s exactly what NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus does in Being the Change. While he’s not your typical government scientist—he commutes by bicycle, meditates, grows and exchanges food—he does approach his life and global warming with the solution-driven focus of one. To Kalmus, individual actions matter: His family cut their climate impact to one-tenth the national average. He finds hope in the data—cutting out some things,...
Blog Post
‘Catastrophic’ mental health changes tied to climate change, study says. What we know
BY JOSH MAGNESS Miami Herald October 09, 2018 11:33 AM On the heels of a United Nations report that warned we have until 2030 to stop climate change from raising temperatures above a key threshold , another study found that the increasing heat could also lead to a decline to mental health. Nick Obradovich, research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and co-author of the new study , warned of “catastrophic” dips in mental health for some if climate change causes the global temperature to increase...
Blog Post
Catastrophic Times: Leadership, When Everyone Is Down (ssir.org)
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, a nonprofit leader shares lessons on preparedness, collaboration, and resilience. Disasters of this scale do not discriminate; they affect the vulnerable and the privileged, the constituents and the leaders. During a disaster, everyone must shore up their available resources—ideally in close collaboration with the rest of the community. Effective collaboration requires leaders—even from unexpected places. Now that the water has receded (though the relief...
Blog Post
Climate Anxiety
I worked on David Attenborough’s documentary. The grim reality gave me climate anxiety Liv Grant For the BBC’s Climate Change: The Facts, I met those living on the frontline. I struggled to cope with what I learned Sun 28 Apr 2019 11.56 EDT Last modified on Mon 29 Apr 2019 06.42 EDT W e live in a time of loss. Wild places dwindle, the animals and plants that live in them disappear. Climate change is now a certainty, and it will without a doubt lead to the loss of land, species, and ways of...
Blog Post
Climate Change and Its Impacts on Mental Health
Psychiatric Times Oct 12, 2018, By David Pollack (ITRC National and PNW Steering Committee Member) Editor’s Note: One of the most important issues of our time regarding human health and mental health is the impact of climate change. This situation is, of course, not about a new impending ice age but is clearly about global warming. This matter has been discussed mainly in the political arena, and there, mainly as a political football/hot potato (no pun intended). Unfortunately, there has...
Blog Post
Climate change and mental health: risks, impacts and priority actions
This is one of the better assessments of the psychological and psychosocial impacts of climate change, though it neglects some key issues. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, October 2018, by Katie Hayes et al. Abstract Background: This article provides an overview of the current and projected climate change risks and impacts to mental health and provides recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change. Discussion and conclusion:...
Blog Post
Climate Change Anxiety: Researcher Shares Tips to Avoid Feeling Overwhelmed [inverse.com]
By Sarah Sloat, Inverse, July 21, 2019 Michele Koppes, Ph.D., is a geographer and associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where she’s spent the last 20 years watching massive glaciers melt away as a result of the climate crisis. She, like many people who follow the news about global warming and its effects, is aware of climate change anxiety, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness about the fate of our planet. Koppes’ work at the intersection of climate science,...
Blog Post
Climate Change as ACE
To ITRC members: In addition to coordinating the ITRC, for almost a decade I have written a monthly column for my hometown newspaper, the Eugene Register Guard (my wife calls it my weekend job!). Last month I began a three part series on how climate disruption is producing numerous trauma. The column below talks about climate change, ACEs, and violence. Bob Doppelt -------------------------------- Climate Change Increased ACEs and Violence Childhood trauma, mass shootings and climate change...
Blog Post
Climate change could leave Californians with 'weather whiplash'
By Brandon Miller , CNN April 23, 2018 (CNN) California is known for its Mediterranean climate. Dry summers and wet winters providing the perfect conditions for a robust agricultural economy, world-renowned wineries and idyllic weather make it the top tourist state in the country. But these same factors leave California vulnerable to shifts in climate, and the weather patterns that traverse the region are conducive to dramatic swings between drought and flood, a sort of "weather whiplash."...
Blog Post
Climate Change is Bad for Your Mental Health [psmag.com]
The world has only a dozen years to act to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change, according to the latest report from the United Nation's top climate science panel out Monday. Without rapid and drastic action, climate change will expose hundreds of millions more people to heat waves, sea-level rise, more extreme weather events—and, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of...
Blog Post
Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves [motherjones.com]
By Rowan Walrath, Mother Jones, February 18, 2019 Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says,...
Blog Post
Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—It’s Fraying Our Nerves “We kind of lose our cool.”
Rowan Walrath, Feb 18, 2019 Mother Jones Over the last year, Rebecca, a 35-year-old woman living in Washington, DC, had been losing sleep over the seemingly endless flow of apocalyptic environmental news. She fretted about the Trump administration’s loosening of emissions regulations and the United Nations’ dire predictions about climate change. In October, she sought help from a psychiatrist who put her on an antidepressant. “It sort of saps your emotional reserves,” she says, “this...
Blog Post
CLIMATE CHANGE'S LOOMING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
Science Matt Simon 8.02.18 FOR THE INUIT of Labrador in Canada, climate disaster has already arrived. These indigenous people form an intense bond with their land, hunting for food and fur. “People like to go out on the land to feel good,” says Noah Nochasak in the documentary Lament for the Land . “If they can’t go out on the land, travel a long ways to feel good, they don’t feel like people.” The Inuit’s lands, though, are warming twice as fast as the global average, imperiling the ice...
Blog Post
Climate Change Turned 99.8% of These Sea Turtle Babies into Girls (livescience.com)
A study published yesterday (Jan. 8) in the journal Current Biology about green sea turtles that nest along island beaches near Australia's Great Barrier Reef found that turtles born in areas most heated by climate change are 99.8 percent female. Turtles born farther south, along a cooler beach, are only about 65 percent female. Due to climate change, Raine Island — the site of the key breeding ground in this study — has warmed significantly since the 1990s, the researchers wrote, likely...
Blog Post
Climate Changed - Scientists on the ground in the world’s forests are witnessing big changes as trees adapt (or not) to the world’s new climate (medium. com)
Forests are one of the most important ways our planet regulates its climate. It's simple: Trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it. Older forests tend to store more carbon than younger ones, and a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire midsized tree. Understanding the world's forest systems is an essential factor in building a picture of our planet's health. Forest ecologists can do this by walking through the...
Blog Post
‘Climate Grief’: Fears About The Planet’s Future Weigh On Americans’ Mental Health [khn.org]
By Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News, July 18, 2019. Therapist Andrew Bryant says the landmark United Nations climate report last October brought a new mental health concern to his patients. “I remember being in sessions with folks the next day. They had never mentioned climate change before, and they were like, ‘I keep hearing about this report,’” Bryant said. “Some of them expressed anxious feelings, and we kept talking about it over our next sessions.” The study, conducted by the...
Blog Post
Collective Trauma is Real, and Could Hamper Australian Communities' Bushfire Recovery [medicalxpress.com]
By Erin Smith and Frederick M. Burkle, Medical Xpress, February 14, 2020 Most of us are probably familiar with the concept of psychological trauma, the impact on an individual's psyche caused by an extremely distressing event. But there's another kind of trauma. A collective disturbance that occurs within a group of people when their world is suddenly upended. Consider the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972, in which a dam burst at a West Virginia coalmine, inundating the town and killing 132...
Blog Post
Community After Disaster, a Therapist’s Musings
Here in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, the entire community experienced prolonged and extensive hyper-arousal – days on end of watching and wondering where the fires would burn next, and far too many sleepless nights. According to the literature on disasters, what follows is a brief honeymoon period, characterized by community cohesion and gratitude. Sonoma County showed up for each other in major ways in the past couple of weeks, and the outpouring of gratitude to the first responders...
Blog Post
Developing Super Powers: Using Resilience Strategies to Cope with Negative Experiences. Introducing CRI's Newest Book!
“I believe that everyone, especially a child, deserves to know how their brains are shaped by environment, to then understand their capacity for building proactive protective factors. We all deserve to be super heroes as we do the best we can to consciously live life well. ” - Teri Barila The superheroes we learn about in comics, movies, and TV shows swoop in to save the world with their incredible powers, to shield people from harm. But in our world, no matter how much we wish to protect...
Blog Post
Disability and Disaster Response in the Age of Climate Change [psmag.com]
Throughout the morning of Sunday, August 27th, Angela Wrigglesworth kept her concerns off social media because she didn't want to worry her parents. But as the waters slowly rose into her Brays Bayou home in Houston, she discovered that emergency services were overwhelmed, dealing with more urgent crises than even the flooding in her neighborhood. Finally, a little after noon, she posted on Facebook: "There is water in our home and we need to get out at some point soon. ... If you know of...
Blog Post
Does Climate Change Cause More War? [theatlantic.com]
It’s one of the most important questions of the 21st century: Will climate change provide the extra spark that pushes two otherwise peaceful nations into war? In the past half-decade, a growing body of research—spanning economics, political science, and ancient and modern history—has argued that it can and will. Historians have found temperature or rainfall change implicated in the fall of Rome and the many wars of the 17th century . A team of economists at UC Berkeley and Stanford...
Blog Post
‘Eco-anxiety’ is a crushing weight for many young Canadians. And they say schools aren’t doing enough
By Natasha Comeau Special to the Star Feb. 23, 2020 During Yellowknife’s first Fridays For Future climate change march last fall, Dr. Courtney Howard spoke about her experience with a condition called eco-anxiety to “the most Yellowknifers I’ve seen in one spot.” She asked the young crowd — an estimated 1,000 people — to raise their hands if they also find themselves worried about climate change, and she watched “all these little hands go up.” Every day, young people are immersed in...
Blog Post
'Ecological grief': Greenland residents traumatised by climate emergency
Greenland Islanders are struggling to reconcile impact of global heating with traditional ways of life, survey finds The Guardian Dan McDougall in Ilulissat and Tasiilaq, Greenland Mon .12 Aug 2019 The climate crisis is causing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety to people in Greenland who are struggling to reconcile the traumatic impact of global heating with their traditional way of life . The first ever national survey examining the human impact of the climate emergency, revealed...
Blog Post
Elaine Miller-Karas Helps Bring the Dalai Lama's Vision to Light
Elaine Miller-Karas, executive director and co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute, has been invited to attend the launch in New Delhi, India, of a special program initiated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Miller-Karas is one of the key developers of the Trauma Resiliency Model® (TRM) and the Community Resiliency Model® (CRM) – biological-based models designed to help people recover from toxic stress. Miller-Karas has shepherded the Trauma Resource Institute since its birth in 2006 into...
Blog Post
Elaine Miller Karas Trauma Summit Interview [60 min - Healing Our Trauma Together]
This is a free sample of one of nine interviews in this online summit, Healing Our Trauma Together. Elaine Miller Karas is a co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute. Her book, Building Resilience to Trauma is a valuable resource for anyone building their resilience skills in these troubled times. www.LivingResilience.net
Blog Post
Got Those Climate Change Blues (article)
"So what are we, the climate anxious, to do? If there's any lesson in my story, I think it's the importance of admitting our personal limitations. Such an admission of human weakness grounds us. It helps us focus. It helps us recharge for the fight ahead and connect with those who share the same vision. It helps me to do what I can." https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2018-2-march-april/last-words/eric-holthaus-got-those-climate-change-blues