One Resilient Earth

The Elevate Prize would help us support a growing number of climate change professionals and community leaders who tackle the impacts of climate change daily, by providing them with emotional and mental health support, and with access to educational resources to implement a transformative and regenerative approach to climate resilience.

We are currently supporting 100 climate workers from around the world with weekly open-sharing and deep-listening “Climate Workers Circles.” The Elevate Prize would allow us to:

• Scale up this successful project, while establishing complementary emotional and mental health support targeted at various groups, based on their exposure and/or culture, to address collective trauma. These services would additionally benefit the community leaders that we support directly through climate resilience projects with local communities.
• Expand our current educational products and services, including through research, to develop the skillset of climate workers so that they can best embrace uncertainty and emergence, (re-)build communities by addressing environmental injustice and cultural marginalization, and restore ecosystems when undertaking adaptation/resilience initiatives.
• Increase the reach of our advocacy work on mental health support for climate workers, as well as on transformative and regenerative approaches to climate resilience.

After working for over ten years with the French Development Agency and the United Nations Climate Change secretariat, including leading pioneering international climate adaptation projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, I founded One Resilient Earth to speak up about the emotional and mental health toll of the climate crisis, to partner with creative individuals and organizations to design long-term socio-ecological resilience approaches, and to support affected communities with my expertise. I believe developing impactful projects with communities is essential to alleviate suffering now and to demonstrate to larger organizations how to change their practices. Speaking up about the mental health impact of climate change work – an impact I have experienced personally – is critical to call attention to heavily affected and underprivileged groups that are in dire need for more support in this area. 

 My vision for the future is to equip climate workers in multiple communities so that they can continuously adapt to climate change at a personal level and regenerate socio-ecological systems despite climate instability. My goals are to assist in developing the resources that foster individual and collective climate resilience, as well as to provide the virtual and physical co-learning spaces for climate workers to thrive.

While 67% of Americans expressed they were 'somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet' in 2020, climate scientists have long been speaking up about their ‘grief,’ ‘anxiety,’‘hopelessness,’ 'depression' and 'burnout', which can prevent them from doint their job. Moreover, direct exposure to disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, can leave 20–35% of survivors with some form of mental health issue, which can result in (self-)violence and aggression. On a warming planet, with only 20% of international climate finance for adaptation/resilience and 2% of public health budgets spent on mental health globally, action is urgently needed. 

One Resilient Earth is a small international team of climate scientists, practitioners, artists, and educators with a wide network. We help restore the emotional health of climate workers through circles, and offer workshops that build their skillset. We provide direct support to local communities in co-developing transformative resilience initiatives, and to universities in enhancing creativity on resilience research. Through publications and interventions in United Nations organizations, we advocate for and support transformative and regenerative approaches to climate resilience, which restore emotional and mental health, address environmental injustice, revive Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, (re-)build communities, and regenerate ecosystems.

Our approach to building socio-ecological resilience starts with strengthening the resilience of each individual at work. Depending on the context, we mobilize a variety of contemporary and ancient techniques (e.g., circles, futures literacy training, mindfulness practice, local Indigenous prayers or rituals), directly or through collaborations. Those techniques provide climate professionals and community leaders with the support and skills they need to cope with the emotionally overwhelming nature of their activities.

We support transformative approaches by fostering synergies between arts, modern science, and ancient wisdom traditions in the design and implementation of resilience research and action. Arts can help create group cohesion, and foster massive personal and collective breakthroughs. Our expertise both in climate science and artistic curation, and our experience in leading international transdisciplinary and collaborative projects make our work unique and provides the best chance of disruptive outcomes. 

Our work with partner organizations and local communities is demand-led, tailored to specific needs, and based on emergence. We apply the principle of 'free, prior, and informed consent' of the local community to all dimensions of the project, including to the dissemination of information and knowledge. As such we improve on most current international cooperation practices on climate resilience.

We are already having an impact by providing direct support to communities affected by climate change, be they local rural communities in Canada, or a group of 100 climate workers from around the world attending our weekly circles. We have raised the awareness of hidden climate change impacts and built the skills of 45 participants in our workshops. We have also enhanced the understanding and creativity of 193 participants and 900 viewers of a digital arts-science lecture series on ‘Ecology and the Metamorphosis of Modern Society.’ Our Tero magazine articles have over 7000 views. As a result, we have recently been invited to provide insights within closed working groups of two United Nations organizations and to support one of their projects. Our advocacy and advisory work with United Nations organizations could support more humanity-wide benefits.

Both the co-designers and beneficiaries of our projects have described their experience as ‘transformative,’ ‘inspiring,’ and ‘immensely needed.’ By scaling up and developing our work on emotional and mental health, as well as our education, research and advocacy activities, we will provide better support to more climate workers, which, in turn, will help enhance the climate resilience of numerous communities and countries.