The takeaway?

Providing youth with spaces to address their emotions and build resilience is a critical strategy for coping with the climate crisis. Investing in non-clinical peer-support groups and expanding access to these resources can strengthen both individual and collective wellbeing.

Through techniques like “active-listening” and “community building,” these “action-free spaces” offer youth time and space to discuss their climate emotions, share experiences, and take a break from the more explicitly valued, externally oriented climate action.

To address this gap, we explored how climate cafés can benefit youth wellbeing. Through interviews with attendees and facilitators in Canada, we found that these spaces help reframe activism by incorporating emotional processing and resilience-building.

Young people report experiencing grief, fear, anger, burnout, and other intense emotions due to climate change.

Yet, there’s limited research on coping strategies to help youth process and manage these climate-related emotions.