4th and 7th May 2022

6 months on from COP26 Psycho-Social Reflections: What have we learnt?

The Association for Psychosocial Studies and the Climate Psychology Alliance are jointly hosting a two-day, international online event reflecting through a psychosocial lens upon the lessons learnt 6 months after COP26.


Two parallel events will be taking place – one in the Western Time Zone and one in the Eastern Time Zone. Sessions in both regions will mirror one another, with the events being a mixture of live and pre-recorded sessions.

Paul Hoggett
Shelot Masithi

Key objectives for the conference

This event aims to:

  • Face together the realities on the ground as a result of the failure of COP26 to effectively tackle disastrous levels of global heating.

  • Increase understanding and enable dialogue between different climate-affected groups and places across the globe.

  • Identify and support emergent processes that strengthen individual and community resilience in their engagement with climate crisis

  • Support the development of psycho-socially informed perspectives and practices around climate change and its impact upon physical and mental wellbeing.

Cartoon by Simon Kneebone

Panellists and Speakers

Rembrandt Zegers

Rembrandt is a researcher of nature relations, organisational consultant and Gestalt psychologist. His current consultancy projects aim to innovate relating to nature in business. He introduced climate psychology in the Netherlands and is also the trustee and mentor of someone with autism.

Kate Adams

Kate is a performance maker and a lecturer at the University of Salford. Her creative practice explores the human relationship with the natural world, drawing on climate psychology as part of her process. Kate is a member of the board of directors for the Climate Psychology Alliance.

Rupert Read

Rupert is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and co-founder of the Green Activists Network, GreensCAN. He is the author of several books including This Civilisation is Finished and Parents for a Future. His new book, Why Climate Breakdown Matters, is due to be published in the summer.

Rebecca Weston

Rebecca lives is Co-President of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. In this capacity, Rebecca organizes and provides support for climate aware mental health clinicians. She speaks frequently about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis, the varied ways in which climate mental issues are interwoven with systems of inequity, the psychological underpinnings of climate denial and the need to open compassionate space for people to engage their emotions and step forward into action.

Renee Lertzman

Renée is a practicing climate strategist and founder of Project InsideOut, a resource funded by KR Foundation. She received her PhD in psychosocial studies from Cardiff University and is author of Environmental Melancholia (Routledge, 2015).

Pushpa Misra

Pushpa's Ph.D. dissertation, titled, The Scientific Status of psychoanalysis, was nominated for the prestigious Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy for its originality and importance and later was published by Karnac Books with the same title. She was a Fulbright Fellow for the year 1993-1994 and did her post-doctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh. Pushpa has worked as a professor of Philosophy under and retired as the Principal pf Bethune College, Kolkata. She is Training and Supervising analyst and currently the President of Indian Psychoanalytical Society.

Annie Kia

Annie's background includes psychotherapy, facilitating local resilience, and extensive work with communities resisting coal mines and gasfields. Her region in the Northern Rivers NSW has endured four natural disasters in the last 5 year and is now dealing with catastrophic flooding and landscape collapse.

Jo Dodds

Jo is a founding member and President of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action. Winner of the Women’s Agenda Emerging Leader in Climate Action, 2021, Jo came to action after the devastating Tathra and District Fire of 2018 and has since become a leading voice for climate survivors across Australia, urging governments to take urgent action on reducing emissions.

Steffi Bednarek

Steffi is a psychotherapist, a trauma therapist and an organisational consultant and trainer. Her work focuses on the development of psychologically informed leadership in a world affected by inter-connected crises and combines psychological perspectives with collective trauma insights and living systems theory. She is a member of the climate psychology alliance and co-founder and co-editor of the journal “Explorations into Climate Psychology”

Jo Hamilton

Jo is a researcher and facilitator focusing on the psycho-social dimensions of energy, climate and social justice. Her current research includes exploring methods to acknowledge and work with the myriad emotions associated with climate justice, and working with energy scenarios at a local community level.

Harriet Sams

Harriet is a prehistoric archaeologist, archaeotherapist, ancestral connector, yoga teacher, ritual celebrant and eco-Druid. Harriet guides and facilitates authentic connection to the land, so that we can truly listen to the teachings of our ancestral past, and become ambassadors for Earth wisdom. Harriet is a PhD researcher in Archaeotherapy at Bournemouth University.

Nadine Andrews

Nadine is a Principal Social Researcher in the Scottish Government currently leading the research on Scotland's Climate Citizens' Assembly. Nadine is also a mindfulness and nature-based coach and trainer, and a visiting researcher at the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University. Following a PhD in the psychology of pro-environmental behaviour, she worked in the science team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change technical support unit for Working Group II (impacts, vulnerability and adaptation) with a focus on social sciences and psychology for the Sixth Assessment Report.

Morag Gamble

Morag is the founder of the Permaculture Education Institute and host of in international learning community exploring ways to regenerate and restore our planet and wellbeing. She connects daily with refugee and village communities being directly affected by climate change with a focus on supporting their resilience and peace through locally adapted permaculture programs. Morag shares big-picture ideas with leading ecological thinkers on her podcast Sense-Making in a Changing World.

Maria Tiimon Chi-Fang

Maria is the Pacific Outreach Officer for the Pacific Calling Partnership. She was born and grew up on the Island of Beru in Kiribati where climate change is of huge concern. Maria works to build a strong relationship between Australians and Pacific Islanders to combat climate change, and has been a key member of Pacific Calling Delegations to multiple UNFCCC Climate Change conferences.

Haaweatea Holly Bryson

Haaweatea is a Transpersonal Psychotherapist and Wilderness Therapist (MA), Rite of Passage Guide and Traditional Māori Healing Practitioner. She is the founder of Nature Knows which specialises in trauma, transition and transformation. She co-leads a Ceremony & Rites of Passage Global Training as well as facilitates trainings in a toolkit of applied ecopsychology for The Joyality Program.

Pastor Ray Minniecon

Pastor Ray Minniecon is an elder Indigenous statesman, and a descendant of the Kabi Kabi nation and the Gurang Gurang nation of South East Queensland, and of the South Sea Islander people from Ambrym Island. He has successfully advocated, nationally and internationally, for the self-determination of Australian Indigenous culture and law, and currently advocates on climate issues on behalf of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Ray is the Pastor of Scarred Tree Indigenous Ministries, and Director of Bunji Consultancies, supporting leadership, business initiatives and community development.

Mujidah Ajibola

Mujidah is a sustainability educator who works to design and implement learning resources and programmes along the themes of environmental conservation, climate change, sustainability and circular economy through her social enterprise, The Sustainability Hub, Nigeria. Having experienced eco-anxiety personally first as a result of an air pollution experience she witnessed and later through engagement with SustyVibes, she acts as an advisor to The Eco-anxiety in Africa Project (TEAP) of Susty Vibes. TEAP seeks to understand and validate the experiences of eco-anxiety and environmental-related emotions in Africans.

Naima Te Maile

Naima is a founding member of Our Future and President of the Pacific Islander Legal Association at the William S. Richardson School of Law. Naima is passionate about climate migration policy and strengthening cross-cultural competencies throughout her legal and non-profit work with institutions like the Institute for Climate and Peace, Blue Ocean Law, and Conservation International.

Tim Harte

Tim is a 25-year-old disability, youth & climate activist living on Wadawurrung Country in rural Victoria, Australia. Serving on the Boards of Youth Affairs Council Victoria, Physical Disability Australia, and Geelong Landcare Network, Tim blends arts and science with lived experience to address social & environmental issues with an intersectional lens.

Kavya Gopal

Kavya is a researcher, organiser, and regenerative cultures facilitator based out of Singapore.

Judith Anderson

Judith is a Jungian psychotherapist who has been involved in the psychology of climate change for 15 years. She is currently Chair if the Board of Climate Psychology Alliance.

Meggie Weaver

Meggie is a 20 year old activist based in so-called Australia. She has been working across the continent with groups using direct action as a means to stop environmental destruction. Meggie is passionate about stopping environmental exploitation and reconstructing our societies in a way that prioritises the environment and our communities.

Organisers

Brenda Dobia

Brenda is a psychologist, educator and social ecologist. Now an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University, she spent 21 years as faculty in its Social Ecology program, focusing on the psychological and social dimensions of the ecological crisis. Brenda is an active member of Psychology for a Safe Climate.

Sally Gillespie

Sally is an active member of Psychology for a Safe Climate, Australia and Climate Psychology Alliance, UK. Her book Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Reimagining Our World and Ourselves explores the psychological challenges and developmental processes of climate engagement.

Wendy Hollway

Wendy is a member of Climate Psychology Alliance (and editor of its monthly Digest) and was a co-founder of the UK Psychosocial Studies network. Her recent book, with Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson and Sally Weintrobe, is Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death. She is an Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Susan Long

Susan is a organisational consultant and executive coach. Previously Professor of Creative and Sustainable Organisation at RMIT University, she is now a Professor and Director of Research and Scholarship at the National Institute for Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA).

Trudi Macagnino

Trudi is a psychotherapist currently doing a PhD on people's experience of the Climate and Ecological Emergency as it presents in the contexts of therapy and eco-activism. She also works in the school of Psychology and Counselling for The Open University.

Julian Manley

Julian Manley is an academic at the University of Central Lancashire, a member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies and a Director on the Board of the Climate Psychology Alliance.

Sophie Savage

Sophie is an Associate Lecturer in Sociology at UWE Bristol. Sophie also works as a research associate on project in pedagogy and social work. Sophie's primary research focus is disability.

Sarah Shorrock

Sarah is a Research Associate in the Institute of Citizenship, Society and Change at the University of Central Lancashire. Her work focuses on vulnerability and collaborative responses.

Christie Wilson

Christie is a psychotherapist, activist, and member of Psychology for a Safe Climate, Australia. Her work with Extinction Rebellion, global support, and GreenLaw explores the psycho-cultural experience of engaging with climate change and justice.

If you have any questions regarding this event, please email: psychosocialreflectionscop26@gmail.com

We aim to respond within 48-hours.