Helping Young People Cope with the Psychological Impact of Climate Change

Climate change is not only a planetary threat; it is also a personal and emotional issue, with significant impacts on young people’s well-being.

Restoring the connection to nature is essential in helping children overcome the psychological challenges wrought by climate change. Long committed to environmental education and to making the healing and developmental benefits of nature available to youth, Gateway Mountain Center is at the forefront of efforts to help young people cope in the present while also preparing for the future’s uncertainties. 

In the words of Gateway Mountain Center founder and Executive Director Peter Mayfield, connecting with nature can restore young people’s “sense of hope and belonging.” This connection can foster the resilience needed to not merely cope but to thrive, even in the face of climate change.

The evidence is clear: Climate change exposes children to lifelong health threats, including major trauma, and can impair the development and functioning of the young nervous system. 

Because their nervous systems are still developing and they have fewer coping skills and resources, children are more vulnerable to the stress and trauma of environmental events than adults. For those who have survived a climate change disaster—losing everything they love, their home, neighborhood, school, friends, pets, and memories in the flash of wildfire or flood—the trauma can be inordinately great. The effects of climate change are generating a global mental health challenge that requires collective action and solutions, now. 

Young survivors of the destructive Camp and River wildfires receive support from the Gateway team and the 4Roots method.

The Camp Fire, which destroyed the city of Paradise in Butte County, was among the most destructive in California’s history. In its aftermath, the Gateway team provided training to teachers and counselors supporting students who had lost their schools, homes, even their loved ones. Among other activities, students of Paradise continuation high school have made their way, twice, to Donner Summit for healing and resilience-building Natural High Retreats. 

After the River Fire destroyed over 100 homes in Nevada and Placer Counties in 2021, Gateway was asked to provide healing retreats for the displaced youth. In engaging with children, the team uses the 4Roots method, based on the latest research and best practices in trauma-informed care, to provide children with support for processing emotions, reconnecting with nature, and restoring a sense of hope and belonging. Nature sensory and nervous-system-balancing exercises are core components, in conjunction with the supportive presence of compassionate, caring adults. 

With nature’s help, young people can replace “checking out” with “dropping in.”

Traumatic experiences can leave kids teetering precariously between two extremes of a sensitivity spectrum: hypervigilant and jumpy on the one side, and numb and “checked out” on the other. Gateway’s nature-based practices allow them to tune into and learn about these states in healthy ways, ways that build agency and resilience. Immersion in nature’s sensorium—sun-dappled leaves swaying in the breeze, sounds of water flowing across sparkling granite, the sweet smells of wildflowers—lets them wake up, reclaim, and befriend their senses and inner sensations.

Another element that comes into play is the edge of risk inherent in the terrain, which motivates kids to “drop in” by demanding their full engagement in the present moment. When record snowpack transformed Gateway’s normal hiking routes into streams, young people displaced by the Paradise fire experienced an introduction to “embodied peak experience.” Jumping from snow to rock to snow, navigating paths blocked by slippery downed trees, precisely following kicked steps to the summit of Stevens Peak, the hikers were exhilarated by challenges that offer proven neurologic benefits. By the time everyone was settled in for their solo sit near the summit, they were all alert, alive, and beaming! 

Communities and individuals must be empowered to provide mental health support for youth in the wake of climate-related disasters.

Given the critical need for action to address the psychological impacts of climate change on youth, Gateway is not only working directly with young people but also guiding others in how to support young people’s psychological needs in the aftermath of disastrous climate-related events.

“The programming provided by Gateway Mountain Center for our teachers and students has been transformational. Our teachers credit their experience with Gateway as the ‘reset’ they needed to help them better care for their own wellness and that of their students.”—Anne Stephens, Phd; Co-Director, Inland Northern Science Project; Director of Outdoor Education Programs, Ecological Reserves, Chico State Enterprises

As organizations such as the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and the Climate Mental Health Network call for anticipatory action to ensure preparedness for climate change–related disasters, Mayfield has been invited to share accessible approaches to trauma recovery from Gateway’s methodology at conferences, to enable other professionals—teachers, social workers, therapists, relief workers—to provide healing interventions for youth and nurture the development of resilience. Parents and other adults can also benefit from such information, enhancing their ability to support the children in their lives.

Training for caregivers and frontline workers, built around the same principles of mindful nature-sensory grounding and embodied engagement as Gateway’s youth programs, can act as a catalyst, Mayfield believes, for the sort of anticipatory action that is broadly needed to promote mental health in a changing climate.  

Mayfield was recently invited to contribute to an informal gathering in Maine hosted by Pablo Suarez of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. The goal was to brainstorm and inspire new activities to offer at international climate conferences, to promote improved mental health in the face of anticipated declines due to climate-related stressors. Participants included risk analysts, disaster managers, humanitarian scholars, climate activists, neuroscientists—even professional acrobats and humorists interested in the topic—as well as others concerned with the mental health dimensions of climate change.  Mayfield led two morning nature walks that combined an embodied mindful immersion in the forest and lakeshore, with the engagement of the bodies' senses of vestibular (movement sense), proprioceptive (position sense) and sensorimotor (movement in relation to all senses).  

The results were encouraging. Reports Mayfield, “The ideas that emerged from this process can inform future conferences as well as educational and therapeutic settings. By supporting mental wellness in a changing climate, we’re building the momentum that is needed to open hearts and minds to collective anticipatory action.”