Evidence and research
Climate cafes are a unique approach to coping with the existential inevitability of climate change. There is evidence to suggest climate cafes are an act of collective care that can promote wellbeing and meaningful climate action among individuals and communities. By summarising journal articles and book chapters below in simple language, I aim to explain the importance of community spaces in which we can process ‘unproductive’ emotions.
‘Eco-distress’, climate change anxiety and climate cafes
When thinking about climate change, many people experience emotions like fear, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, and grief. This has become so common over the past two decades that researchers have termed the experience ‘eco-distress’.In 2021, Stanley and colleagues analysed different types of eco-distress among Australians and how people might act in accordance with those emotions.
Anger, it seems, propels people to act individually and collectively. Frustration, located as a part of anger for the purposes of Stanley et al.’s study, was the most common emotion named. Anxiety and depression was linked with less climate action, both collective (like going to a protest) and individual (like buying compostable packaging).
From this study, it appears that eco-anger is the most ‘productive’ climate change emotion - it causes people to act in ways that protect the environment. This begs the question of how we can involve those experiencing other forms of eco-distress in movements that not only protect the environment, but also foster collective wellbeing. A climate cafe may be a space where eco-distress can be processed in a way that doesn’t prioritise production of action, but rather prioritises wellbeing of community members. This may seem counter-intuitive when we experience eco-distress, but it may be the only way for us to survive in the face of climate catastrophe. This is not to diminish the vital work of climate activism, but to allow us space to process a full spectrum of emotions, keeping ourselves engaged.
Calabria and Marks (2024) interviewed a small group of women to assess a one-off climate cafe’s impacts on mental wellbeing. The women in this study identified personal responsibility for sustainability as a trigger for eco-distress. Women also discussed how sharing the weight of eco-distress in a climate café fulfilled them in a different way compared to exclusively activism-focused groups. We see here differing forms of eco-distress noted by Stanley et al (2021).
However, some interviewees mentioned barriers to connection within the climate café space, such as lacking acknowledgement of cultural factors upon personal experiences of eco-distress. For instance, only one participant in this climate cafe was not white/Caucasian. She noted that this group dynamic impacted her ability to share the full scope of her eco-distress. It is possible that problems like this could be addressed if members of diverse communities affected by climate change are involved as collaborators in the process of developing projects like climate cafes.
Co-design and participatory action research (PAR)
Co-design, or participatory-action research (PAR), is an approach to design where a specific community experiencing a social problem collaborates with professionals to facilitate positive change through projects, events and research according to needs voiced by said community (Cornish et al., 2023). Professionals in this context might mean academic researchers (hence participatory-action research), architects, policy-makers, and many others. In other words, co-design prioritises community opinions over professional opinions regarding what actually needs to change to make things better for community members.
If you would like to learn more about what goes into codesign, please take a look at beyondstickynotes.com, created by a group of excellent codesign teachers, supervisors and facilitators based on Wangal country (Western Sydney, NSW, Australia). This rich resource contains clear diagrams and easily understood written explanations of how codesign works.
What would a co-designed climate cafe look like?
Because this is not a formal study, and the organiser is not a professional academic researcher, this project does not necessarily fall under the PAR banner. However, the organisation of the cafe is approached with co-design/PAR principles in mind.
I believe that an event like a climate cafe is an ideal opportunity to engage with co-design principles. In this case, people local to Wurundjeri land (Inner Melbourne, VIC) can collaboratively design an event to allow us to process eco-distress in a way that would actually make us feel good, and is sensitive to sociocultural impacts upon people’s lived experience.
Carlton Climate Cafe would like to acknowledge that this event is being collaboratively designed and held upon the land of the Wurundjeri people, and recognise the many Indigenous knowledges and traditions of collective care that long predate the notion of the climate cafe.