The Urgent Need, Methods, and Benefits of Enacting the New ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy for Climate Change and Other Adversities
12 noon to 1:00 pm PST (3:00-4:00 pm EST) on the new ITRC Climate Change Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy
Click here to register for the December 2 webinar
Why the Need for a New Climate Change Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy?
Climate science indicates that global temperatures will, in the not-too-distant future, rise above the 2.7-degree F. temperature threshold that unleashes civilization-changing impacts. From more extreme wildfires and hurricanes to record droughts and heatwaves, some of the impacts are already evident. The public in the U.S.–and in every other nation–is unprepared for the coming tsunami of mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems that will result. If we remain so, climate-generated psychological, emotional, spiritual, and behavioral problems will threaten the health, safety, and wellbeing of every child and adult nationally and worldwide. They will also accelerate physical health problems. And, they will activate a vicious cycle whereby self-protective emotional reactions block efforts to slash emissions, which worsens the climate emergency, and circles back to turn increase mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems.
The New ITRC Climate Change Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy
Developed through extensive research and supported by a team of 20 experts, the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC) has developed a new Climate Change Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy to prevent and heal climate-generated psychological, emotional, spiritual, and behavioral problems. The policy calls for community-based, multisystemic, population-level initiatives to be launched nationwide and globally to build individual and collective resilience to push back against externally-generated climate traumas and toxic stress pileups.
In specific, the ITRC policy calls for establishing local broad-based Resilience Coordinating Councils (RCCs) that: a) offer all adults and youth the opportunity to learn simple age and culturally appropriate mental wellness and resilience information and skills; b) enhance personal, family, and community strengths; d) build and connect social support networks across economic and geographic boundaries; and e) engage local volunteer, non-profit, private, and public organizations in the adoption of principles, practices, and policies that build a local culture of psychological and emotional resilience.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- Why disaster mental health, individually-focused clinical therapy, and direct service programs are incapable of addressing the scale and scope of the mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems generated by the climate emergency.
- Why launching community-based, multisystemic, population-level mental wellness and resilience initiatives is essential to prevent and heal the individual and collective traumas generated by the climate emergency — and by many other social, economic, and ecological adversities as well, including the Coivid-19 pandemic.
- The core elements of community-based, multisystemic, population-wide mental wellness and resilience initiatives, how to organize them, and the many benefits they provide for individuals, children, families, non-profits, businesses, and the public sector nationwide.
- U.S. federal, state, and local policies needed to foster and sustain community-based population-wide mental wellness and resilience initiatives nationwide.