The climate crisis is a growing presence in our everyday lives. We cannot avoid the reality of the threats it poses – to our safety; to life plans and expectations for the future; to our sense of worth as it challenges our destructive behaviours. In facing up to the situation, we encounter powerful emotions that can be difficult to bear. But how does our exposure to expert knowledge, our feeling of agency – and ability to make a difference to what happens – affect those emotions and how we handle them? Climate assemblies provide us with a platform to discover just this. In recent years, assemblies have become more common. They bring together individuals to broadly represent the wider population, tasked with deliberating on information provided by experts to produce a set of recommendations to inform government policy and decisionmaking. My research took place with the Scottish Government’s Climate Assembly, made up of 105 members. I wanted to explore the emotional experience of members compared to the overall population. The Assembly met over seven weekends between November 2020 and March 2021, addressing the question ‘How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way?’. I included climate emotion questions as part of the research because I knew it was likely the participants were going to be experiencing things. There is a duty of care to participants, but I think this is the first Climate Assembly to take that properly into account. A HUB FOR OPTIMISM In the past few years, there has been more research around climate anxiety. These are mostly population surveys, not context specific. This was the first context-specific research for members of a Climate Assembly. We really didn’t know anything about how people’s experiences differ depending on contexts. Do they stay the same? Do they change? For each weekend except the first – which occurred before I was in post – we asked all the participants questions about common climate emotions (hopeful, excited, optimistic, worried, upset, overwhelmed) to gain insight into the impact on their mental health. Members of the Assembly had much higher levels of excitement/hopefulness – 79%on average, compared to 52% among the general population – and their optimism went from being similar to the public after Weekend 2 – 37% and 39% respectively – to being much higher by Weekend 6 (62%). Members’ levels of worry reduced from 48% to 28%over the same period, compared with 68% for the general public. The population survey found 25%of the public agree that their feelings about climate change have a negative impact on their mental health – significantly more than the mean 7% across all weekends for the member surveys. It was interesting to see, because it could have gone in any direction. Assembly members might feel more 24 |
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