Research

INTRODUCTION

As the ongoing burning of fossil fuels accelerates the climate crisis (IPCC 2022), the emotional and mental health toll of ecological and biodiversity loss and their widespread impacts on personal, social, and collective life is significant (da Fonte et al. 2023). Ecological grief, including the pain and sadness related to “experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change” (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018: 275), is gaining attention both for its prevalence (Tschakert et al. 2019, Comtesse et al. 2021, Benham and Hoerst 2024) and its potential to galvanize action on behalf of the ecological world (Head 2016, Cunsolo and Ellis 2018).

Whereas ecological grief describes emotional pain arising from many forms of environmental loss and destabilization, climate grief describes grief for losses specifically tied to climate change (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, Cianconi et al. 2023, Pihkala 2024). Although people with close relationships with land—Indigenous Peoples, rural communities, nature-based workers, climate scientists, and environmental activists are among those most affected (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, Middleton et al. 2020, Benham and Hoerst 2024)—climate grief also impacts people who worry about the future and the existential threat climate change poses to life and societies (Head 2016, Comtesse et al. 2021, Ojala et al. 2021). As the burning of fossil fuels continues unabated, grief for the multitude of losses associated with the destabilization of ecological, social, economic, and political conditions is expected to grow (Head 2016, Tschakert et al. 2019, da Fonte et al. 2023).

Although grief is a difficult experience, it is also a reasonable and adaptive response to the magnitude of loss produced by climate change (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, Comtesse et al. 2021). Grief studies have long argued that grief is an expression of love and attachment (Attig 2004, Weller 2015, Breen et al. 2022). Although there is ongoing debate about how best to apply bereavement theories to ecological loss (Randall 2009, Pihkala 2022a), there is broad agreement that facing and integrating climate grief plays a role in sustaining mental health (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, Comtesse et al. 2021). Beyond the individual benefits to mental health, scholars have theorized that climate grief may be fertile ground for inspiring individual and collective action by illuminating shared vulnerabilities and common interests that unite individuals with both human and more-than-human communities made vulnerable by the forces driving climate change (Barnett 2022, Varutti 2024).

However, those experiencing climate or ecological grief often lack support and opportunities to legitimize their grief, as dominant culture, shaped by anthropocentrism and colonial values, fails to recognize the more-than-human world as “grievable” (Butler 2003, Cunsolo-Willox 2012). The resulting “disenfranchisement” (Doka 2002) of ecological and climate grief can leave grievers without cultural scripts, rituals, or community support to process climate-related losses (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, Ojala et al. 2021, Pihkala 2024).

Bereavement studies show that disenfranchised grief can overwhelm and manifest as chronic mental health difficulties, avoidance behaviors, numbness, diminished well-being, and a stifled sense of personal agency and efficacy (Doka 2002, Turner and Stauffer 2023), all of which diminish personal well-being and the ability to respond to the climate crisis (Lertzman 2015, Albrecht 2019, Chapman and Peters 2024). What’s more, the disenfranchisement of climate and ecological grief also contributes to the erasure of the inherent value of human and more-than human life threatened by climate change. It follows that supporting people to grieve, that is, internally process feelings of loss, and to mourn, externally recognize and honor what has been lost, serves not only to support mental health, but also affirms the value of what and who is a stake. In this way, grief and mourning are critical practices for bringing those threatened by climate change into the fore of ethical concern (Cunsolo-Willox 2012, Barnett 2022, Varutti 2024).

Despite the pervasiveness of climate grief and theoretical interest in its potential to inspire climate action (Comtesse et al. 2021, Walpole and Hadwen 2022, Pihkala 2024), academic research investigating the relationship between lived experiences of climate grief and mobilization is nascent. There are no established best practices for supporting mental health or harnessing climate grief’s generative potential. To help fill this gap, we investigated the experience of adults who had accessed a climate-mental health program in Alberta, Canada for addressing climate grief and other difficult emotions related to climate change. Specifically, we characterized the lived experience of ecological and climate grief; explored how ecological and climate grief connected to personal values; and examined how ecological and climate grief shaped engagement with the climate crisis.

METHODS

Refugia Retreats: community programing to process ecological and climate grief

This qualitative study was developed and conducted with Refugia Retreats, an Alberta-based organization that has provided community programming on ecological grief and other emotional impacts from planetary crises since 2016. Refugia Retreats’ programming invites participants to explore the emotional, personal, and political dimensions of overlapping ecological, climate, and social crises. Their programs range from psycho-educational workshops to multi-day experiential programs, and they engage a wide variety of groups, including grassroots organizers, community members, and people working in a variety of professional fields.

Data collection

We invited people who completed past Refugia Retreats’ programs to participate in in-depth interviews about ecological and climate grief. All interviewees had voluntarily participated in Refugia’s more immersive or ongoing programs focusing on the emotional toll of climate change and related issues. In these programs, participants had engaged in varied experiential practices for processing emotions related to climate change and associated issues, such as meditative practices, arts-based activities, somatic exercises, rituals, and varied opportunities for structured sharing.

The in-depth “life-world” interviews (Brinkmann and Kvale 2018) focused on experiences of grief for ecological loss, the emotional impacts of climate change, and how interviewees have honored and processed these feelings. The interview guide can be found in Appendix 1.

In total, 15 adults (n = 15) were interviewed between November 2023 and January 2024. Interviewees ranged in age from early 20s to 50s. The gender makeup of the interviewees reflects the typical gender makeup of Refugia Retreats participants (J. Lammiman, personal communication, November 2023), with the majority identifying as women (n = 13), one identifying as non-binary (n = 1), and one as a man (n = 1). Three interviewees identified as people of color. Interviewees were a mix of parents, prospective parents, and people choosing not to have children. Although it was not a selection criterion, all interviewees were relatively engaged with the issue of climate change and its impact on social and ecological justice. All interviewees had experience working, organizing, advocating, or volunteering in climate, environmental, or social justice fields. Roughly half the interviewees approached climate change from a social lens while the other half approached it from an environmental or science lens. However, all interviewees saw environmental and social justice as fundamentally linked. All interviewees also engaged in personal practices in response to their concerns about the ecological crisis, such as teaching pro-environmental values to their children, personal practices for connecting with the more-than-human world, personal sustainability practices, and engaging with climate change related news and issues.

All interviewees lived in either Edmonton (n = 2) or Calgary (n = 13; Alberta, Canada) at the time of their participation in Refugia programs, though one participant had moved by the time of the interviews. Most interviewees were affected by extreme climate events that had taken place in the province, including the Calgary flood of 2013 (Lalani and Drolet 2019), the heat dome of 2022 (Jain et al. 2024a), and progressively worsening wildfire seasons (Jain et al. 2024b). The summer prior to the interviews (2023) shattered regional climate records, with wildfires 10 times more severe than recent averages and many weeks of extremely poor air quality (Jain et al. 2024b). Interviewees’ experiences of ecological grief were also shaped by Alberta’s oil and gas-dependent economy and relatively conservative mainstream political culture (Adkin 2016). Interviews were conducted in-person or remotely and ranged from 40 minutes to 2 hours, with most interviews being around 80 minutes. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Although the participant pool skewed female, climate-engaged, and emotionally reflective, their high level of engagement and ability to articulate complex emotions offered uncommon depth and richness to the data. The gender imbalance typical of Refugia participants might reflect women’s disproportionate experience of climate grief (Aylward et al. 2022), and gendered social norms that stigmatize emotional vulnerability in men (Benham and Hoerst 2024).

Data analysis

Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clark 2022) to identify patterns across interviewees’ experiences of ecological and climate grief. Analysis started with intensive review of the interviews via repeated listening and verbatim transcription. Each interview was summarized, reflected upon, and key quotes that reflected the main themes were highlighted. Through this familiarization process, an initial set of codes was generated. Those codes were considered against the full data set and refined and revised in a recursive and iterative analysis cycle that included review by the research team and member checking with interviewees. To promote self-reflexivity and help identify bias, the first-author also kept a reflection journal to track her own emotional and psychological experience throughout the process. A reflexivity and positionality statement (Levitt et al. 2018, Braun and Clark 2024) outlining some of the first author’s relevant experiences in relation to the study’s subject matter is provided in Appendix 2. The final manuscript was shared with participants prior to submission for publication, and all participants were invited to a presentation about the study findings. All participants gave informed written and oral consent to participate in the study, and this research was approved by the University of Alberta Human Research Ethics Boards (Pro00135174).

RESULTS

Results overview

Interviewees shared stories about both ecological grief and climate grief. In both cases, grief was a complex emotional response to ecological loss and destabilization and its far-reaching impacts on their lives, relationships, communities, and identity. Their grief included often interconnected emotions of “sadness,” “anger,” “anxiety,” “rage,” “despair,” “frustration,” “immobilization,” “numbness,” “hopelessness,” “loneliness,” “betrayal,” “love,” “awe,” and “longing.” Far from being a single emotion, interviewees described ecological and climate grief as the affective experience of living during times of unprecedented ecological loss and planetary instability.

Ecological and climate grief as a site of personal, ecological, and collective entanglement

For most interviewees, climate grief intersected with personal, ecological, and collective forms of loss and difficulty. They felt grief on behalf of human and more-than-human communities harmed or endangered by the climate crisis and ecological destruction, as well as grief for the varied ways the climate crisis directly impacted their personal lives, relationships, and communities. Interviewees often described these different realms of impact as intimately intertwined, recognizing that “all oppression is connected” and that “human rights [are] deeply connected to the environment.”

Grief for ecological loss

All interviewees placed immense value on their relationship with the more-than-human world, describing it as “meaningful,” “humbling,” “grounding,” “medicine,” “sacred,” “holy,” “freeing,” “healing,” a “huge source of support,” an “anchor” for their activism, a place to “feel held,” and as generating “awe.” Land was described as an important source of support that nourished interviewees’ mental health and well-being and helped them sustain their engagement with larger social, climate, and ecological issues.

This deep connection to land meant that its destruction and degradation elicited profound distress and grief. One interviewee, while working in the backcountry, experienced a “spiritual crisis” as she witnessed the beauty and richness of land threatened by climate change:

Being on this land, wondering what was going to happen to it because of climate change. I was canoeing every evening on these inlets and bays that were just teeming with life. There were birds everywhere, and muskrats and insects and deer. It was incredible. And for the first time I realized what was at stake, in terms of the complexity of life and the beauty of it. Yeah, I had a lot of grief and then more of a spiritual crisis.

For her, recognizing the preciousness and complexity of biodiversity while understanding the severe threats it faces led to profound emotional turmoil, underscored by the term “spiritual crisis.”

Interviewees were often surprised by the intensity of grief they felt on behalf of the more-than-human world. An environmental scientist recalled the “devastating” emotional impact of being in a forest slated for clear-cutting. Until that moment, she had considered ecological grief from an intellectual perspective, but “being in a forest for the last time” triggered her first emotional encounter with it:

I got back in my car and ... I just bawled ... Like, it was actually more devastating to be in a forest that was going to be clear-cut than being in a clear-cut ... Even now, that brings up a lot of emotions.

Similarly, an environmental consultant who had previously worked for oil and gas companies recalled the “visceral” feeling of being “in the remote forest, walking in crude oil up to our boots ... Dead animals and species you have to document ... That was heavy.” In both accounts, interviewees described embodied distress as they “saw with [their] own eyes” the environmental devastation caused by industry.

Interviewees described a creeping sense of melancholy as incremental and chronic environmental change disrupted their sense of home, personal history, and beloved land-based activities. An environmental scientist recalled admiring the newly blooming crocuses on her first date with her husband. Ten years later, the unpredictable spring rarely aligns with their anniversary, representing “things not being normal.” Similarly, a climate organizer shared how warming winters disrupted precious memories of “skating on the canal” with her father, who had since fallen ill. An avid camper expressed loss over how the constant threat of wildfire smoke and extreme heat had disrupted the ease of summer, saying, “It’s just getting smokier and smokier ... Summer used to be so fun and carefree. It’s not anymore.” In these accounts, interviewees described how shifting seasons, extreme weather, and environmental changes estranged them from the environmental context that had shaped their lives.

Environmental changes caused by climate change also led to dangerous weather conditions that further hindered interviewees’ ability to connect with the natural world. Interviewees reported feelings of “sadness,” “fear,” “intense anxiety,” “anxiety in my body,” “despair,” and sleeplessness due to the worsening wildfire smoke and poor air quality that have recently characterized Alberta summers. A climate organizer whose relationship to land represented a tremendous source of strength and resilience reflected:

It’s not even just disconnection [from nature], but all of a sudden having the feeling of like, danger ... Days where it’s so smoky it’s actively harmful for me to spend much time outside. And that imposed strain on the relationship ... What that does to kind of like, toxify a relationship that means so much to you.

As the ecological crisis disrupts interviewees’ access to the richness and fulfillment that comes from environmental connection, they described grief not only for individual ecological losses, but also for their lost ability to relate to the natural world as a place of ease, familiarity, and secure attachment.

Grief for personal loss

Because the climate crisis and ecological instability formed the backdrop of interviewees’ experiences, many noted that exploring ecological and climate grief also surfaced grief for personal loss and difficulty. Sometimes personal grief was produced or intensified by ecological loss, while in other cases, climate grief and personal grief triggered each other even when not directly connected.

Grief for personal losses intensified by the climate crisis

The intertwining of ecological and personal grief was especially pronounced for parents. As a mother to a young child said, “being a parent” is what brought the climate crisis “into the emotional space of no longer just thinking about what this future looks like for me, but what does this future look like for my son?” Another mother brought a photo album of her family to illustrate how love and concern for her family was intimately connected to her ecological grief: “When it comes to ecological grief ... [it’s] like, what do I love? ... This is what I love. And this is what’s at risk ... I have kids of my own. What is their life going to look like?” Parents described their ecological grief as including both concern for their children’s lives and well-being in the face of a climatically and socially unstable world, and a sense of vulnerability about the personal toll these concerns take on their own well-being.

For prospective parents, the emotional complexity of parenthood was also a significant feature of ecological grief. A climate organizer described the question of whether to have children as “so full of grief either way—If we don’t have a child, or if we do have a child. There’ll be a lot of loss, and lots of things to confront.” Prospective parents described deep personal grief at the “heartbreaking” possibility of missing out on the love that animates a parent-child relationship, while also sharing concerns over the heightened vulnerability of loving a child in a world where life feels increasingly precarious.

Another climate organizer who wrestled with the ethics of having children in a climatically unstable world explained how climate change compounded grief from pregnancy loss:

It’s like, okay, we made the decision before. We’re gonna try to get pregnant. We’re gonna go ahead and have this baby. And then a pregnancy loss happens and it’s like, okay, now we have to decide again. And then again.

Pregnancy loss is a difficult experience in its own right, but because of the moral weight that the climate crisis added to their decision, she and her partner faced the additional burden of deciding whether to try again.

The background existential insecurity that the climate crisis casts over life also affected how interviewees experienced losing loved ones. An environmental educator recalled processing ecological disruption alongside her mother’s dementia and the death of someone she considered a mother-figure during an ecological grief ritual. She explained,

I remember ... recognizing that, we’ll all lose our mothers ... It’s the nature of being human, that we love and we lose. And there’s something almost comforting in knowing that’s the cycle ... But [because of] climate disruption ... All these beautiful cycles of however many millions of years of this earth’s evolution are being disrupted ... Where’s the wisdom for this?

The disruption of natural cycles made the prospect of losing her mother feel less like a painful rite of passage that others have weathered, and more like a loss without precedent.

Grief for personal losses triggered by climate grief

Many interviewees also noticed that exploring and processing ecological grief in programs like Refugia often triggered personal grief, even when there was no clear link between the two. A full-time climate organizer shared that she was initially surprised by how much her personal grief comes to the surface when participating in spaces for processing climate grief. She explained:

Oftentimes I’ve gone [in] being like—okay, I’m gonna feel the weight of the climate crisis ... And the grief that comes up for me first and foremost isn’t directly environmental or climate grief. It’s like, you pull on one thread of grief and there’s so much underneath it. And there’s so much else that it pulls on. And they’re all, you know, deeply connected.

Several interviewees shared a similar experience about opening themselves up to “the weight of the climate crisis” only to encounter personal grief for divorce, family estrangement, or illness.

Just as ecological grief sometimes evoked personal pain, processing personal loss also led some interviewees to ecological grief. An environmental scientist recognized a direct link between their positive experience grieving their father’s death in a hospice program as a teenager and their willingness to seek out community with which to process climate grief. For them, “climate grief” is deeply intertwined with “many other kinds of grief because a lot of these issues are interconnected and part of a larger system.” An environmental educator with adult children echoed the observation that her relationship between personal grief and ecological grief goes “both ways.” She explained that “it’s not just about going into the darkness and the difficulty [of] our ecological crisis, but also of my personal, emotional ups and downs.” For her, addressing both personal and ecological grief is important because “whatever we don’t become conscious of can silently govern us.” By bringing these emotions to the surface in “wise and compassionate ways,” she avoids being immobilized by unresolved grief.

A climate organizer, initially surprised by the personal grief that emerged alongside ecological grief, questioned whether treating ecological grief as a separate category obscures its recognition. She noted that this approach might create “the assumption that somewhere, there’s a specific bucket of ecological grief,” rather than seeing it as an “interwoven web” where many types of grief and loss are entangled. Her observation reflects the experiences of most interviewees, who found great value in exploring, sharing, and processing ecological grief and climate grief in a holistic way that acknowledges its connection to their personal lives and relationships.

Grief for collective loss

Interviewees frequently described how climate and ecological grief intertwined with grief and loss for other socio-political injustices, including war, genocide, colonization, forced migration, inequitable impacts of the covid pandemic, and racial injustice. A doula described how the overlapping ecological and social crises during the pandemic, which included wide-spread protests over racial injustice and police brutality, led to “constant” grief that nearly “overwhelmed” her ability to cope.

With everything that happened around like, police brutality, and white supremacy ... [and] the polarization that came with the pandemic—the loss of relationships and the fragmenting of community ... My own personal health issues ... All of these things just felt like they were falling apart ... And I was falling apart too.

Interviewees recognized the various ways “marginalized people face the largest impacts” from the climate crisis at local, national, and international scales. A community health worker described grappling with the injustice of being able to protect herself from dangerous weather while the houseless community members she works with cannot: “When it’s really smoky out, I have a place to go indoors and breathe air that’s cleaner. I can be out of the sun, or I can be out of the cold.” Similarly, an international development practitioner’s first encounter with climate grief coincided with learning about “the disparity between how people were approaching flooding” in different parts of the world. While her own community was erecting walls along the river, in the Global South where people are far more endangered by storms and rising sea levels “people were literally learning how to swim.”

Others expressed grief and anger over how the political, economic, and industrial systems driving the climate crisis continue to disproportionately harm marginalized communities. An environmental consultant spoke of witnessing “things that were really disturbing in terms of how the oil and gas community impacts Indigenous communities. There are environmental and social impacts too.” Similarly, a social worker lamented the focus on technical solutions to climate change, pointing out how they neglect and often exacerbate social inequities and are “tied to my climate grief because ... it just seems like more injustice.” A climate organizer echoed this frustration when she described how her activism is often fuelled by “rage at the disproportionate power that corporations and a small capitalist elite hold over our communities and our planet.” Interviewees’ accounts highlight how ecological grief was often an expression of the intolerability of injustice.

Although grief for the impacts of ecological destabilization on social injustice left many interviewees feeling angry and, at times, despairing, the intersections between social, environmental, and climate issues was also a source of motivation that allowed interviewees a wide scope for interventions. An interviewee who had lived in both the Global North and the Global South said “I don’t see any disconnection from all of the problems. It all comes back to our approach to the environment and thinking that we can own it, instead of being able to work with it and each other.”

The relationship between climate grief, love, and capacity for action

As is demonstrated by interviewees’ stories, their experiences of ecological grief were often expressions of love for that which was threatened by the climate crisis: cherished ecological relationships, children and loved ones, fulfilling experiences, and justice. Some interviewees described a multi-directional relationship between grief and love. A former climate organizer described how “falling in love and getting married” brought forward new dimensions of ecological grief as she reckoned with all of the love and hopes for the future she may not get to express because of climate change.

I have a totally different relationship with the future ... I just had so much grief before meeting her about feeling alone and isolated ... And now, I have less grief around that, and all this grief around ... the future that we want with each other. Everything we want to experience together and everything we feel like we’re capable of in terms of raising a child. And then knowing it’ll just be so full of grief either way.

Similarly, an environmental scientist shared that the first time they “felt a deep emotional connection to the natural world and started becoming concerned about climate change” coincided with their “first time falling in love.” This “powerful emotion” made them realize that “we have to take care of so much to be able to have this experience of love” and undermining the ecological basis of what sustains human life threatened this possibility. Both interviewees described how expanding their capacity for love, richness, and fulfillment sensitized them to climate grief by raising the stakes on what the climate crisis threatens.

The symmetry between love and grief that these accounts suggest was also evident in other areas of interviewees’ emotional lives. Several interviewees noticed that neglecting difficult emotions related to climate grief disconnected them from joy, presence, and aliveness. A mother who works in social housing described that the cost of “numbing or dissociating” from her difficult emotions to “cope” is:

... not enjoying the things that are joyful, you know? Those things are harder to feel joyful about if you’re not fully engaged. So I guess if you numb yourself to the bad, sometimes it’s also numbing yourself to the good.

An environmental educator agreed that “stuffing down” grief and sadness for the troubled times we are living through can be “immobilizing” and leave her “feeling so bad and not realizing that all that stuff [grief and pain] just needs to come out some way or another.” She described how “dealing with” her difficult emotions through meditative practices and Refugia programs helps her feel “more freedom and ability to be energized to work on behalf of the greater good.” Interviewees described how facing and processing ecological and climate grief helped them inhabit the full spectrum of their emotional lives, including positive feelings.

Several interviewees also noticed that honoring ecological grief “generates more self-compassion.” An interviewee, whose ecological grief intensified her mental health challenges explained that she has become more “kind and gentle” with herself because participating in spaces for honoring ecological grief reminded her that “we are all trying our best, and you don’t need to feel guilt.” A climate justice organizer explained that the “systemic element” of ecological grief “brings you to this place of recognizing the entanglement of all things.” Viewing her struggles within this broader context “makes it easier to extend compassion to yourself and others.” Because ecological grief frames difficult experiences within a wider social-ecological context, interviewees were able to view personal difficulties as part of a larger, collective experience, leading to greater self-compassion.

The cost of numbing ecological grief was not only joy, self-compassion, and fulfillment, but also interviewees’ capacity to identify the better world that they long for. Interviewees noticed that, with support, getting in touch with ecological grief disrupted social norms that encourage people to “distract and bury” their emotions and authentic experience to “keep going with business as usual.” As one interviewee put it, acknowledging and honoring climate grief reminds her that “it doesn’t have to be like this. So what does that look like for me to not just numb myself to it so that I can keep going in a way that is socially acceptable?” Interviewees described how being in touch with climate grief helped them recognize the interplay between their personal lives and broader, ecological, and collective conditions that helped them imagine alternate possibilities for life and society.

The value of framing difficult climate emotions as grief

Many interviewees shared stories of receiving pathologizing messages about their sensitivity to ecological and social injustice with people in their life suggesting that their emotional responses were inappropriate or disproportionate. Interviewees described being “made fun of for being too sensitive,” feeling “embarrassed” and “naive” for caring about the environment, and feeling “incredibly alone” and “isolated” when expressing their pain over ecological loss and climate change.

Finding the language of climate and ecological grief destigmatized often painful emotions by reframing them as an “expression of deep love” for the world. Interviewees’ stories about ecological grief demonstrated that it was a complex emotion with many different sides: anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, mental health difficulties, love, longing. Many interviewees did not initially recognize their emotional response to climate change and connected social injustices as a form of grief. An interviewee recovering from burnout described the value of reframing her emotional experience of climate change and related injustices as an expression of “collective grief”:

I used to think grief is just what happens if someone dies. [But] I’m like a highly sensitive person and I feel like I’m grieving all the time, just because of the state of our world and I never felt that that was valid ... So this idea of collective grief was very helpful in affirming those feelings ... and having language for it.

Another interviewee with mental health challenges no longer uses the term “climate anxiety” to describe the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. For her, “recontextualizing” her distress as a form of grief recognizes something that terms like “anxiety” miss: that she is “losing something” of fundamental importance, “[her] connection to the earth.” A counselor agreed that reframing emotional pain about the climate crisis as grief is destigmatizing and helps people see their pain as meaningful and informative. She explained:

With people coming into therapy, I’ve had to say like, when it comes to ecological grief, you can’t do therapy. Because there’s nothing to fix. What people are experiencing is absolutely real. And it’s a sign of deep love and connection. If you’re angry, if you’re hurt, if you’re terrified—that fits. Those are absolutely appropriate responses.

Framing the emotional impacts of the climate crisis as grief helped interviewees reclaim difficult emotional experiences as “a form of resistance.” As one interviewee put it, “It’s so much easier to become desensitized or to just turn away from all of the pain and suffering” but doing so costs her capacity to feel love for and interdependence with a precious and vulnerable world. Interviewees explained how reframing emotional pain about ecological destabilization and associated issues was an important step toward destigmatizing a capacity that should be nurtured instead of shut down: a felt-sense of love for and interconnection with a vulnerable world.

Results summary

Taken together, our results demonstrate that climate grief is best understood not as a discrete form of grief, but as cumulative grief for overlapping ecological, personal, and collective losses shaped by climate change. Holistically processing and honoring climate grief unlocked emotions and values associated with both well-being and capacity for climate action, like love, self compassion, solidarity, and longing for a better world. Understanding their climate distress as a form of grief was key to reframing interviewees’ painful emotions as sources of love and personal values that guided participants’ unique contribution to the better world they long for. Figure 1 illustrates how honoring and processing the ecological, personal, and collective dimensions of climate grief led to improved well-being and strengthened interviewees’ capacity for values-aligned climate action.

DISCUSSION

The study demonstrates that grief for the impacts of ecological destabilization is felt in the most personal and immediate realms of life; ecological grief is not an abstraction felt on behalf of distant places, people, or species. Similar to prior research, we found that climate change impacted relationships to place and the more-than-human world (Albrecht 2019, Middleton et al. 2020, Borish et al. 2021), as well as interpersonal relationships (Hogett and Randall 2018, Budziszewska and Głód 2021), future prospects (Ágoston et al. 2022, Wray 2022, Pihkala 2024), physical and mental health (Ebi et al. 2021, Aylward et al. 2022, da Fonte et al. 2023), personal stressors (Tschakert et al. 2019, Ebi and Hess 2020, Lawrance et al. 2022), and political and ethical life (Benham and Hoerst 2024).

Our findings expand on previous research by showing how these scales of climate grief reflect powerful emotions that connect individuals to ecological, personal, and collective vulnerabilities shaped by the climate crisis. Even for those relatively shielded from the worst impacts of climate change, climate grief heightened social and ecological consciousness by revealing shared vulnerabilities across human and more-than-human communities.

Understanding the interconnected scales of loss and vulnerability that emerge in climate grief may help people grasp a feature of the climate crisis so confounding it is labelled a “wickedness” (Incropera 2015), that its complex, cascading, and interrelated causes and effects reflect the interdependent nature of ecological and social life (Sellers et al. 2019, Redvers et al. 2022, Alook et al. 2023). Experiences of climate grief could play a role in awakening a relational perspective, long advocated by Indigenous climate leaders (Redvers et al. 2020, Alook et al. 2023), that understands humans as fundamentally interdependent with the environment. Supporting people to face the layers of loss and vulnerability that arise in climate grief could accelerate the systems transformation necessary for survival (IPCC 2022, Walpole and Hadwen 2022).

Interviewees’ accounts demonstrate the mobilizing potential of ecological grief. Those grieving injustice engaged in solidarity work; others grappling with climate-mental health struggles facilitated climate cafes and grief circles; a concerned parent led environmental education for children; and those angered by corporate greed organized against fossil fuel lobbies. The way grief clarified interviewees’ values and guided meaningful action reinforces research showing that emotional pathways often motivate behavior more effectively than facts alone (Davidson and Kecinski 2022). Emotions shape how people appraise risks, interpret relevance, and decide whether to act (Davidson and Kecinski 2022). Thus, emotions are central to the psycho-behavioral processes between perceiving climate change, comprehending its significance, and acting. Importantly, grief is not just an emotion but a relational process of valuing and making meaning from loss (Butler 2003, Cunsolo-Willox 2012, Weller 2015). This makes grief a powerful framework for transforming emotional pain into fuel for pro-social and pro-environmental engagement with climate change that aligns with personal values.

Our findings suggest grieving and mourning practices played a key role in improving well-being and transforming distressing emotions into motivation for values-aligned climate action. This has important implications for how to support psychological resilience alongside engagement with the climate crisis. Drawing on diverse grief theories (Boss 1999, Stroebe and Schut 1999, Doka 2002, Kübler-Ross and Kessler 2007), climate emotion research, and coping literature, Pihkala’s (2022a) “The Process Model of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief” identified three key tasks for developing psychological resilience to climate change: emotional processing, values-aligned action, and psychological distancing. The model also outlines three stages of coming to terms with the climate crisis: (1) limited awareness; (2) psychological turmoil marked by oscillation between distress, action, and avoidance; and (3) a more integrated phase characterized by ongoing emotional processing, more sustainable action, and self-care. A key question that arises from this model is how to support people awakening to the climate crisis to move from the turmoil of phase two into the more integrated resilience of phase three. Many of the interviewees in our study appeared to be in, or on their way to, the third phase of integration because of their longer-term engagement with climate change and holistic coping practices. Their accounts suggests that grieving and mourning practices may support this shift by energizing a reciprocal relationship between emotional processing and values-aligned action. Additionally, although the model emphasizes individual coping, our findings highlight the critical role of community-based emotional processing in building resilience.

Understanding climate distress as grief also helped move interviewees toward “meaning-focused coping” (Ojala 2013), which is shown to sustain mental health and climate engagement by reappraising adversity as an opportunity to live one’s values and find purpose in the struggle (Folkman 2008, Ojala 2013). By highlighting the love and values that underpin interviewees’ climate distress, the vocabulary of ecological grief reframed personal pain as a compass pointing toward what participants value most. This promoted well-being and revealed motivations for climate action (Gillespie 2019, Schwartz et al. 2023, Wamsler et al. 2023).

In addition to its connection to values and meaning, climate and ecological grief also shared territory with emotions associated with both well-being and climate action, like love, joy, self-compassion, agency, and longing for a better world. Grief and bereavement studies have long established that grief is an expression of love (Attig 2004, Breen et al. 2022, Weller 2015). Our findings support the idea that people’s concern about climate change increases when they see it as threatening their “objects of care” (Wang et al. 2018), such as beloved places, family, or personal values.

More surprising was the way love and fulfillment sometimes heightened interviewee’s ecological grief by raising the stakes of what can be lost in the climate crisis, and what can be gained under conditions for human and ecological flourishing. Interviewee accounts revealed an overall symmetry between not only love and grief, but also pleasurable and painful emotions more generally. This finding echoes a large body of trauma research that suggests healing is not about feeling “better” so much as feeling more (Fosha et al. 2009, Van der Kolk 2015). Coping with climate grief appeared to expand interviewees’ emotional “window of tolerance” (Siegel 1999), allowing them to stay present with both distress and life-affirming emotions like love, purpose, and agency.

In this way, climate grief shares characteristics with what Audre Lorde (2000) calls “the erotic,” an embodied source of knowing and power accessed through one’s deepest feelings, that uncovers not only pain and dissatisfaction from living under unjust conditions, but also the potential for fulfillment, and desires for a better world. Ecological grief, like the erotic, may awaken a deep yearning for a world that nurtures the flourishing of personal, ecological, and collective life. This parallel expands ecological grief’s conceptual lineage into social movements that have long histories of leveraging embodied feelings to raise sociopolitical consciousness (Ward 2023, Gumbs 2024).

The relationship between difficult emotions associated with grief and positive emotions associated with well-being highlights a possible path between ecological grief and post-traumatic growth. Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004) define post-traumatic growth as “positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances” (p. 1). Facing and processing ecological grief with adequate support may awaken new depths of love, joy, and purpose. Our results also highlight the critical role of social support in climate-related post-traumatic growth (Cruwys et al. 2024, Tito et al. 2024), as interviewees’ ability to honor grief and re-engage positive emotions happened in the context of supportive group spaces.

Overall, a key insight from this study is how framing climate-related distress as climate grief helped interviewees make meaning of their difficult emotions, supporting both well-being and climate action. Recent years have seen a proliferation of terms to describe the emotional impacts of climate change (Albrecht 2019, Pihkala 2022b, Cianconi et al. 2023), yet many of these terms overlap and lack clear distinctions (Pihkala 2022b). Scholars (Kałwak and Weihgold 2022, Qiu and Qiu 2024) have also worried that individualized, psychological language risks pathologizing legitimate distress about structural injustice.

Rather than emphasizing semantics we may be better served by recognizing that emotions are not merely objective internal states but also socially and politically constructed by the language we use to describe them (Ahmed 2014). Considering how language shapes interpretation of emotions is especially important given the ambivalent impacts of climate distress (González-Hidalgo 2021, Martiskainen and Sovacool 2021), which has been linked to climate action, denial, and disengagement (Davidson and Kecinski 2022, Lertzman 2015), and is increasingly co-opted by bad actors for harmful ideologies like eco-fascism (Conversi 2024, Hartman 2024).

As our study shows, grief is not a single, static emotion, it is a complex, multi-dimensional, affective experience connected to meaning making (Weller 2015, Turner and Stauffer 2023). Understanding their experience as grief destigmatized interviewees’ emotional responses by shifting the focus from individual pathology to the social-ecological context of the climate crisis (Kałwak and Weihgold 2022).

Additionally, framing climate emotions as grief invokes familiar cultural scripts and social norms associated with collective care, such as community support and rituals. Collective support is essential for maintaining well-being during the psychological and spiritual challenges posed by climate change (Hamilton 2022, Cruwys et al. 2024, Tito et al. 2024). Activating social norms that recognize the importance of community care helps build individual and community resilience (Pihkala 2024, Turner and Stauffer 2023).

The synergy between honoring ecological grief and connecting with values and emotions that inspire climate action such as love, solidarity, and longing for a better world has implications for the mental health field and for political movements. This research highlights the need to integrate ecological and climate grief into broader understandings of mental health, acknowledging how the climate crisis not only produces ecological, personal, and collective loss, but also amplifies other grief and stressors (Tschakert et al. 2019, Lawrance et al. 2022, Benham and Hoerst 2024). Mental health practitioners must develop the skills to support individuals experiencing ecological grief while acknowledging how the structural nature of the climate crisis shapes individual mental health. Investment in spaces that facilitate emotional processing and teach coping practices is also needed to destigmatize and socialize the reasonable distress that people feel as they comprehend the implications of climate change (Doppelt 2016).

At the same time, political mobilization efforts should be grief literate (Breen et al. 2022, Cooke et al. 2024) and understand attending to grief and pain from personal, ecological, and social losses tied to climate change is part of “the work” of creating transformative social change. This aligns with research on the emotional dimensions of environmental justice activism, where grief work helps prevent burnout, preserves sensitivity to injustice, and enables values-based resistance (Hoggett and Randall 2018, Nairn 2019, González-Hidalgo et al. 2022). Developing emotional coping and social support systems helps build the “transformational resilience” (Doppelt 2016) needed to turn climate distress into meaningful action. Building widespread capacity to cope with ecological and climate grief may play a critical role in sparking self-reinforcing feedback loops where well-being and capacity for collective action grow together (Doppelt 2016, Schwartz et al. 2023).

CONCLUSION

Climate grief provides a valuable lens for understanding the complex emotions tied to the climate crisis as the affective intersection between individual and collective experiences of loss and vulnerability. By illuminating the personal impact of ecological and collective loss, ecological grief challenges individualist and neoliberal ideas of the human as separate from nature and one another. Recognizing ecological grief in this way is crucial for preserving its political potential as a source of inner wisdom, one that can guide us toward creating a world where all life can flourish.

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the psychosocial impacts of climate change and the capacity of climate grief to raise ecological and social consciousness, and inspire solidarity and climate action. Our results suggest that supporting mental health and mobilizing people to protect the world they love and the future they long for are goals best pursued together.

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