Introduction

The European Congress of Psychology in Moscow in July 2019 seems like another world, a world without facemasks, social distance and all the rest. At the conference I presented, via video link, the Robert Roe Award lecture celebrating Robert Roe’s contribution to psychology. I have written up an extended account and you can download it from here 

Robert was an inspiring leader and his personal and professional values have been influential for so many of us. His passing in February 2016 also seems like a different world but I would  recommend reading his work as it is as up to date as ever.

It and I have always been a great admirer of Robert’s vision for how psychology can address real world problems and what its future focus should be, and it was with much encouragement from him that I was part of three EFPA groups over the years, the Board of Ethics, the Board Human Rights and Psychology and the Board of Prevention and Promotion. I learned a good deal from all of them, and in my paper, I develop the connections between ethics, human rights and ethics with the climate and environmental challenges we face and how psychology can contribute to finding solutions.

Some psychological associations, for example the APA, have had divisions that focussed on environmental psychology. Neither the BPS nor EFPA have had such networks and yet there are expert psychologists throughout Europe and indeed globally, in this field of work. These are now playing a prominent role as finding ways that psychology can help us address the way we are changing the climate and the environment; after all it is about people and how we live together – psychology -  in its many domains of practice.

So has been encouraging that the BPS established  a climate and environmental crisis steering group in October 2020 which aims to develop a network that can collaborate on efforts we need to make to address these challenges. This is also true of the EFPA’s plans, which is more good news. The bad news, of course, is that we, among many others, have come to the party very late in the day and we need to significantly up our game to have any hope of mitigating the worst impacts.

The Steering Group is establishing two ‘task and finish’ groups. One to examine the impact of climate change on health and the second on the role psychology can play in social, organisational and individual change.
The two groups have been chosen from four priorities area and are a first step. Both groups will draw on the experience we have all had during the covid-19 pandemic which has raised everyone’s awareness of the connection between the environment and human health and the social and psychological challenges of how we respond to them.

Below are some articles from members of the Steering Group that have been published in the BPS magazine  The Psychologist.

In 2010 David Uzzell delivered the joint British Academy/British Psychological Society Annual Lecture, on psychology and climate change entitled “Collective solutions to a global problem”.

“The public are concerned about climate change. Typically, surveys from governments, pollsters and universities show that around 80 per cent of adults are very or fairly concerned about climate change. But levels of concern are on the wane – the UEA e-mails affair, the hype surrounding Copenhagen and the failure of the politicians to produce a significant agreement, and scepticism in the media have no doubt all played a part.”

Read more  

Climate change, industrialization, and conflicts over scarce resources uproots families, and causes them to migrate to the outskirts of densely populated megacities (an ideal environment for recurrent virus diseases).

This highlights the urgent need for online-based, large scale mental health interventions, in particular for high-risk children and youth. In the wake of this migration, countless numbers of children - more than one million in the European Union alone – have been separated from parents and grow up in foster families, group homes, refugee camps, slums, etc. How can our profession help public authorities and NGOs improve the mental health and learning of this vulnerable population? The author’s paper in press analyzes how climate change is causing a rapid adaptation process in traditional rural and indigenous people families to their new urban environments. This intercultural challenge tends to increase the risk of family system disorganisation, poor child attachment, and subsequent child abandonment. [1] 

After lecturing and studying child-in-care organizations in many countries since 2008, the author co-founded and developed the Danish non-profit Fairstart Foundation. Its mission is to help organizations build national local competences in Alternative Care. In long-term partnerships, local needs for staff education are researched, and the contents of six-month online classrooms for staff are designed on the EdX university education platform from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To define quality care, an expanding network of international psychologists and researchers generously contribute to program development [2].

By studying attachment, group development and organizational theories, students acquire skills in how to train local groups of caregivers in daily care and learning practices. In each module, a student trains a local group of caregivers, using a memory stick with a program version in the local language, adjusted to cultural strengths and challenges. After training, students practice peer feedback and receive daily online support from Fairstart. Pre-and -post questionnaires for caregiver and child development are electronically registered for outcome research. 

In current partnerships, SOS Children’s Village staff in four East African countries now train local foster parents. For Greenland government, two educations in Inuit and Danish are implemented [3].

The invaluable interest from EFPA [4], from its group for Promotion and Prevention, and the American Psychologist Association, has helped Fairstart educate more than 500 staff in 26 countries, who have trained the caregivers of 40,000 children. This cooperation across borders and professions demonstrates our profession´s ability to respond to the growing need for mental health interventions, as well as the low-cost and large-scale dissemination qualities of blended learning designs.

References:

[1] Rygaard, N.P. (in press) Climate Change, Migration, Urbanization, and the Mental Health of Children at Risk in the European Union - A Discussion of the Need for Large Scale Interventions European Psychologist (estimated publication July 2021).

[2] The www.fairstartfoundation.com. For details: 
https://www.academia.edu/33897146/2017_European_Psychologist_Association_Presentation

[3] Video Examples from partner organizations 

[4] In particular, the inspiration and support from former EFPA presidents Robert Roe and Telmo Mourinho Baptista, among others.