Studium Generale Groningen hosted an urgent conversation about climate anxiety and how to cope with it on Tuesday, 10 October. The event – “Dealing with Climate Anxiety” – hosted by Meriam Tuinhof and held in the aula of the Academy Building at the University of Groningen – featured speakers Ernst-Jan Kuiper, professor Peter de Jonge and EP Groningen PhD candidate Valentina Lozano Nasi.

The panelists shared their experiences with climate anxiety from a personal perspective and spoke about how that has informed their academic research and, in some cases, personal activism.

Developmental Psychology professor Peter de Jonge has focused on climate anxiety in his recent research, including a close collaboration with another EP Groningen PhD candidate as her supervisor, Lena Holzle (whom De Jonge frequently deferred to when it came to questions about the complex emotions that climate change evokes and how difficult they can be to differentiate from each other).

Ernst-Jan Kuiper currently works at Milieudefensie and is active with Extinction Rebellion, and spoke at length about his journey from watching “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006 to studying climate physics and ultimately devoting his time, energy and self-acknloweldged privileged position to demand climate action.

Valentina Lozano Nasi will defend her thesis in December, but her research on the novel construct of transilience has already garnered wide coverage. Transilience – persistence, adaptability, and transformability in the face of climate change – is about making changes for the better, rather than “bouncing back”.

Valentina’s research on transilience gave a much-needed sense of hope to the evening’s discussion, and inspired many questions from the audience. The panelists all acknowledged that none of them, and no single research or solution, is a magic wand to fix the issues of climate change, but many audience members sought tips and recommendations from the experts on how they can best cope with their own climate anxiety.

Valentina’s advice: The way to motivate action is to inform people about what is wrong, coupled with the things that they can do to try and change things or at least make them less severe. She also emphasised the importance of viewing climate change, and any mitigation efforts, as a global effort, not individual:

“Climate change doesn’t effect individuals in isolation, and we need to address it collectively.”