Climate anxiety has moved from a niche presenting issue to something more clinicians are seeing across all kinds of practice. It shows up as grief for a changing world, dread about the future, and a sense that standard therapeutic frameworks weren’t built for a crisis this large.
This page is smaller than most on this site, reflecting how young the field still is, but the four books here cover real ground. Together, they give a working picture of how the specialty has developed since 2017.
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Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change: A Clinician’s Guide
Leslie Davenport, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017
Davenport was one of the first clinicians to write directly for therapists on climate-related distress. She covers anxiety, grief, and trauma tied to environmental damage and disaster, and builds her interventions around guided imagery and mindfulness rather than starting from a specific diagnostic framework.
It’s frequently described as the field’s foundational clinical text, and the age shows a little – the clinical literature on climate distress has grown substantially since 2017. It’s still the starting point most clinicians new to this area are pointed toward.
Davenport is a licensed psychotherapist who helped shape the American Psychological Association’s 2017 report on climate change and mental health, and later built the first climate psychology certificate program for therapists at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown
Judith Anderson, Tree Staunton, Jenny O’Gorman, Caroline Hickman (eds.), Routledge, 2024
This collection argues that ecological concerns need to enter the therapy room directly, and that every therapeutic modality needs adapting to actually meet the scale of the climate crisis. Chapters move between climate science, the emotional and ethical dimensions of practicing during ecological collapse, and practical accounts of climate-aware therapy with children and adults, including voices from clients themselves rather than only clinicians. Contributors take on decolonizing therapy, the psychological dimensions of collective trauma, and what resilience actually means under sustained uncertainty.
Hickman, one of the four editors, researches youth climate anxiety at the University of Bath, which shows in how seriously the book treats therapy with children and adolescents rather than folding it into general adult practice. It’s the most recent clinical text on the page, and one of its contributors, Steffi Bednarek, also edited the anthology below.
Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety
Steffi Bednarek (ed.), North Atlantic Books, 2024
Where the Anderson collection works from inside established clinical modalities, Bednarek’s anthology pushes further. It questions whether the standard goal of returning clients to a psychological “baseline” still makes sense when that baseline is itself built on the systems driving the crisis. Contributors take on decolonizing therapy, the psychological dimensions of collective trauma, and what resilience actually means under sustained uncertainty.
It’s the most theoretically ambitious book on this page. Better suited to clinicians already comfortable with the basics covered by Davenport’s guide than as a first introduction to the field.
Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief
Ashlee Cunsolo, Karen Landman (eds.), McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017
This book sites closer to environmental humanities and ecocriticism than to clinical psychology, though it draws on all three. Contributors work through what ecological grief actually is: the loss of species, landscapes, and ways of life. The material here is philosophical, artistic, and case-based rather than a set of treatment protocols, drawing partly on Cunsolo’s own interviews with Inuit communities experiencing climate-driven loss firsthand.
It’s a useful companion for understanding the shape of ecological grief in depth. Clinicians looking for session-ready interventions will find more of that in the other titles on this page.