How to give more room to climate emotions?

When climate change is discussed in the classroom, the focus is usually on the facts: CO₂ levels, melting ice caps, extreme weather. But there’s something else just as important that rarely gets the space it deserves. It is high time we start paying more attention to climate emotions in education, according to Utrecht University researchers Michiel van Harskamp and Andrik Becht. Today, they will be discussing best practices for teachers at Utrecht Science Week. We asked one of them to give us a preview of what to expect. 

When asked about climate change (watch video), young people don’t feel just one thing. “It’s important to demystify the idea that all young people are worried about climate change,” says researcher and teacher Michiel van Harskamp. “Some are even bored by it. Some think, ‘I can’t do anything about it, then why bother?’ Others say, ‘I don’t really believe it will affect me too much.’ But of course, you also see young people being worried and activistic. That’s very common too.”

Research shows that it’s common for young people to shift between emotions (worried one day, indifferent the next), or experience them all at once. For teachers, this wide range of responses raises a challenge: how do you deal with a classroom of 30 or 200 where every student feels something different about climate change?

Emotions guide a lot of our decisions.

Emotions matter

“It is well-known that emotions guide a lot of our decisions,” Van Harskamp says. “There’s a very nice paper by psychologist Jonathan Haidt called The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail. His point is that our decisions are driven first by intuition and emotion (the dog), while reasoning (the tail) usually comes afterward to justify those gut feelings.” 

In other words, feelings like helplessness, anger, guilt, hope or indifference all shape how people engage with the climate crisis. For example, climate anxiety can push someone towards activism, while despair can cause avoidance, or the other way around. “Research is still mixed on exactly how emotions influence action, but one thing is clear: if teachers want to prepare students to engage meaningfully with climate change, ignoring emotions is not an option,” Van Harskamp says.

Creating space for emotions

So what can teachers at schools and universities do? 

Make sure that students feel seen and heard.

The most important step is simply creating a safe space where students feel their emotions are acknowledged. “Making sure that people feel seen and heard. That, of course, involves creating a setting where people feel safe to share what they actually think or feel,” he explains. “It’s really important to show that it’s perfectly fine to have all of these different emotions. They happen, and we just have to find a way to navigate them.”

Bringing emotions into the classroom won’t make the fight against climate change any less complicated, Van Harskamp clarifies. But it can make space for students and teachers to learn to empathise with each other, and find constructive ways to respond together.