To read a previous DeSmog story on the relationship between the climate crisis and collective trauma healing, please click here.

As the COP29 climate talks get underway in Azerbaijan next month, DeSmog will partner with the Pocket Project to bring together leading climate justice advocates and trauma specialists to explore the psychological barriers to effective action — and how they can be overcome. 

The Climate Consciousness Summit 2024 will run online from November 15 to 21 and feature more than 30 speakers including former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres; Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty; and Melinda Janki, a lawyer fighting ExxonMobil’s attempts to drill for oil off Guyana.

Other guests include Goldman Environmental Prize-winner Makoma Lekalakala; psychotherapist Francis Weller; Greenland Indigenous elder Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq; psychologist Steffi Bednarek; and collective trauma facilitator Thomas Hübl. 

“This unique event is a sign of growing awareness in the climate movement of the importance of addressing the root causes of the crisis, including the role of unresolved trauma,” said Kosha Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, and a co-host of the summit. 

The free event will feature daily live calls; voices from affected communities; a report from a DeSmog journalist on the ground at the COP29 talks in Baku; embodiment practices; poetry; and a chance to join Global Social Witnessing calls, where participants come together in community to explore their responses to the impacts of the climate crisis. 

“The summit will serve as a resource for anyone struggling with the overwhelming nature of climate change, and help each of us identify how we can contribute towards a more coherent global response,” said Sonita Mbah, one of the summit co-hosts. 

To find out more and register click here. 

‘Knowing What I Do’

The summit includes an in-depth video interview with Lindsey Gulden, a former data and climate scientist at ExxonMobil, who is now using her insider knowledge to spotlight the tactics the oil and gas industry is using to delay action to slash planet-heating emissions.

“Knowing what I do about the inside of the oil industry, knowing what I do about climate change and the existential threat that it poses to us, to our children, to our grandchildren, I have much more responsibility than the average person to stand up and speak out,” Gulden says in the interview. 

A partial transcript of Gulden’s remarks will run on November 7 on DeSmog and Gen Dread, a newsletter supporting people to cultivate resilience in the face of the climate crisis created by Britt Wray, a climate and mental health researcher at Stanford School of Medicine.

Other summit guests to feature in DeSmog stories that will run in advance of the summit include Immad Ahmed, founder of Empower the Future; Lucy von Sturmer, founder of Creatives for Climate; and Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives.  

Matthew Green, DeSmog’s global investigations editor, said the summit will explore how an emerging understanding of the impact of collective and inter-generational trauma on politics and society could inform more effective action by the climate movement.

“The climate crisis can be seen as the manifestation of generations of unresolved trauma accumulating in humanity’s collective psyche,” said Green, a summit co-host, whose Resonant World newsletter serves the global trauma healing movement. 

“The good news is that incredible breakthroughs can occur when we come together in community to acknowledge this hidden legacy, and growing numbers of practitioners around the world are learning ever more powerful ways of doing this work,” Green added.

DeSmog’s years of investigative journalism dedicated to exposing the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to derail climate action have placed the nonprofit newsroom in a trusted position to steward leading-edge conversations with environmental defenders at the summit.

The Pocket Project, meanwhile, is a nonprofit dedicated to growing “a culture of trauma-informed care” through training, consulting and social impact projects. The collaboration builds on a Global Social Witnessing event the organisation staged with DeSmog last year focused on the struggle to prevent the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure on the U.S. Gulf Coast.