Do we need to feel anxious about climate change to do anything about it? Do we need to have “climate literacy” to know how bad things are? What are the conditions that help people know climate change is a risk, perceive it as a threat, feel climate anxiety, and transform their climate anxiety into climate efficacy? My guest this week, Dr. Charles Ogunbode, is an expert on global climate emotions, and his work challenges all the assumptions in this flow chart– it’s not as simple as learning about climate change, perceiving the risks, pumping up our anxiety, then acting on it, despite so much pop-climate-psychology telling us so. Emotional responses to climate change around the world are much more complicated. In this interview, he shows us how to decolonize the emotional frameworks of mainstream psychology, so we can be more effective in working for climate justice around the world.
Shownotes
- Charles Ogunbode’s home page
- Susan Clayton’s book, Conservation Psychology
- Kari Norgaard’s book, Living in Denial
- Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz explaining the “risk perception” problem of climate change on the Bill Moyers show in 2013
- Pew research on climate feelings
- value-action gap concept explained
- Meta-analysis published recently in global environmental change on climate anxiety
- Ogunbode’s 32 countries essay
- Dr. Renee Lertzman on apathy and denial
- Ditte Jurisic on conceptual deprivation
- Batja Mesquita’s book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions
- Collaborative research with Jennifer Uchendu about climate emotions in African countries
- Social media and climate anxiety research project
- Joseph Reser on psychological adaptation
- Jason Hickel’s book, Less is More
- Hospicing Modernity by Andreotti
- Rebecca Solnit work on “freedom from”...in an interview for Tricycle podcast
- Bayo Akomolafe on post-activism
- Ditte Munch-Jurisic’s article about how people come to perceive climate change https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-021-03390-3
- Marlis Wullenkord's paper about thinking beyond instrumentality in our engagement with climate emotions:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-026-02444-5.
Transcripts
Charles Ogunbode: How do people in Africa feel about climate change? That's the more relevant question. When you say, "do they feel climate anxious", you've already set the point of reference, and it's very much a Western-based point of reference as opposed to, this is a global problem. This is a global experience. What's it like for you?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy human side of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Do we need everybody to feel more climate anxiety? If more people felt more anxious about the climate, would that motivate more climate action? That's a question at the heart of the research of my guests this week, doctor Charles Ogunbode.
Dr. Ogunbode is an assistant professor in Applied Psychology at the University of Nottingham in England, where he conducts research on psychology and environmental change. His early work focused on environmental attitudes, worldviews, and how extreme weather experiences shape pro-environmental intentions and actions. He led large cross-national studies examining climate emotions, and climate justice related beliefs in diverse contexts. Currently, he is investigating how the psychological impacts of climate change are shaped by racial, geographic, and economic inequalities.
Dr. Ogunbode insists on distinguishing between using the tools of psychology to get resources distributed to the people who are most impacted by climate change, which he wants us to do, versus using psychology to get more people to care and act, which he sees as a colonial practice. From there, we dig into this common aphorism in climate circles. "Climate anxiety is just a rational response to a burning world." The assumption underlying that statement, is that greater climate awareness leads to greater climate anxiety, which then leads to greater climate action.
Dr. Ogunbode really challenges that logic, which has huge implications for how climate change is communicated and taught, much less solved. In the end, what this conversation offers is a new way of understanding climate distress in a diverse world, where the psychological categories of my own culture, like anxiety or efficacy or happiness, as well as the way I come to understand climate change as a risk the culture I'm raised in, are not universal, and we can't try to make them universal.
Dr. Ogunbode's work has been a beacon in my own research, and I was hanging on every word in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it, too. Let's dive in.
♪♪ Welcome to the show, Charles.
Charles Ogunbode: Thank you.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: My first question for you, what led you to research environmental emotions? Why did you even start thinking about that?
Charles Ogunbode: It's complicated, long story, but the short version is I started out wanting to be a conservationist, so my first degree was in wildlife management. I was always interested in nature, of my undergraduate education. I spent about a year traveling around various national parks in Nigeria, and I very soon came to realize that I love the problems with environmental protection were not really about the ecology and the science side of it.
A lot of it was just to do with people, how people feel about the environment, how people think about it, conflicts of values between conservationists on one side and communities who want to use natural resources on the other. And so that was the trigger, if you like, that made me think, Oh, I think some knowledge of psychology would be useful here.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. I love that.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. And then the second kind of big step was my encounter with a book titled Conservation Psychology: Promotion Human Care for Nature, which you probably know this book, by Susan Clayton.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yep. I'll put it into the show notes.
Charles Ogunbode: Someone gave me that book. [laughter] That was really the thing that sort of started my career in environmental psychology. So I read that book and I thought, this is absolutely what I want to be doing. And so it just kind of went from there. But coming to emotions specifically, a lot of my research, and it still continues to be informed by this perspective, but my research has always been from a sort of risk perception perspective because that was one of the dominant paradigms, I guess, within the field when I started out. And so, I did a lot of studies around public understanding of climate related risks, and the dominant thinking was people should be more concerned, and they're not concerned because they didn't know enough or because they didn't understand the scope, the magnitude, the serious severity of climate change. But the more I worked on this, the more I realized it really wasn't that. And when it really came home for me was in 2019, I think it was, I was working in Norway, and I went to this protest, the young-- Yeah, what's it called?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: The climate strikes. Yeah.
Charles Ogunbode: The climate strikes. Yeah. I went to one of the protests, they had a demonstration in Bergen where I was working there. And I looked around at all these people, young people, really passionate, really, you know, I thought it's really not it's not about a lack of insufficient understanding of the risk at all. People are really worried and people are really concerned. And need to think beyond trying to elevate and intensify people's sense of risk, but also thinking about what that's doing to people. A lot of the problems that our theories of risk have been developed from, things like financial risks, or health risks, or things that people can take a relatively discrete set of actions to resolve. Climate change isn't that.
Even if we all start acting in pro-climate ways, cut our emissions down to zero, their baked in impacts are still going to be impacting us for a long-- This is a really long campaign. So that model at that point, it just seem to me that that model just doesn't really work. And we also need to start thinking about how do we help people stay engaged for that long campaign? And that was-- that's the kind of thinking that's guided my work with emotions from that point on.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: So shifting away from the risk perception theory approach, which was pretty much the only-- the main going lens on thinking about climate emotions, how do we get people to perceive this as a risk? And I'm thinking about, you know, in the early days of the Yale Center for Climate Communication, that was all the discussion--.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: --I mean, Tony Leiserowitz was on the Bill Moyers show, you know, to say, here's why climate change doesn't meet risk perception models, and here's how we can fix that.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, pretty much.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And so climate communication was born out of this kind of trying to overcome the risk perception problem.
Charles Ogunbode: Exactly, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And you're saying it turned out there was way more going on. You went to the youth climate strikes, and you said, something else is going on, and it really mirrors my own journey of realizing, Oh, no, people care. Something else is going on here.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And it was just, I feel like I look back at it now and I think it was actually kind of in my face before then, because there was all this data from around the world. The PU Research Center runs the studies annually where they ask people about the perceived severity of climate change. And invariably, so there's you know, huge majorities across most countries now, recognize the risk, worried about it. So really, I don't think that-- there isn't very much, you know, we can do in terms of moving the needle.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That's often described in environmental or climate psychology as the value-action gap, right? There's care, but where is the action? Can you maybe describe what that theory is and tell me where your research leads you to think about that? Yeah.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, so the value action gap, I think, falls in the same kind of-- that was very much part of this way of thinking that I came up with, and I've kind of dropped that along with the let's make people more scared paradigm, as well, just because there's something inherent in the value gap. Well, there are two ideas there that I find problematic. The first thing is this instrumentalization of emotions and beliefs and perceptions. It's like, Okay, we need to-- it should be the case that it's almost like there's an expectation that emotions are this mechanistic thing. We hit that button, people get worried or scared, and then they do X.
And I feel like the people who subscribe to the idea, don't spend a lot of time thinking critically about the problems. If society really did function like that, where if we're just scared about something, we become more open, we become more compliant, and everyone just does the thing that we you know, somebody, somewhere decides is the good outcome.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Whether that's climate or something, yeah.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, whatever it is. Don't you think that could become problematic in a broader sort of sense? And then the second thing is it's also a very strong interest of people who are kind of all about behavior change. And again, I've got some problems with the whole behavior change paradigm because, again, it feels like there is a group of people who think we know the right thing and we need to correct you or bring you over to the correct behavior. And again, I find that kind of problematic because it-- I think we don't respect there's a wisdom of the public. There's an everyday wisdom that people have, that I think that sometimes academia isn't appreciated enough, and those kinds of paradigms don't allow us to really see that, to recognize it, to give space to those kinds of wisdoms to come into the conversation.
So, I've over time, also moved away from that I moved more towards let's just-- I think I would say my main value driving my research is this desire to contribute to a self-understanding, and I mean self as our collective selves, to just understand us better. And then the better we understand ourselves, the better able we are to take on these big challenges, rather than having a subset of experts that just prescribe what society should be doing or what we should do. But, the one benefit I think I've appreciated the most about the turn towards climate change emotions is I think it's really brought in this, um, Turn towards just care, just caring.
You know, moving away from that people are a thing to be manipulated and to be-- I think climate motions have done a really good thing to-- Again, I would say, you know, speaking from my particular corner of psychology, where it's been-- it favors a particular approach to the world, very simple models with very mechanistic kind of ideas about how things relate to one another. And I feel like that's been perfect for that sub-behavior change type stuff, but not so much for the messy emotions and just dealing with people as humans and, you know, the human experiences that doesn't fit neatly into those models.
And as much as-- I was trained to be a quantitative psychologist, and I like to do that, but I also enjoy sitting with the messiness of it and just trying to make sense of-- So what the emotions turn has allowed us to do, is have more of that. It's just really kind of think about people in their complexity, and nuance, and contradictions and all that. And I also like the fact that we will obviously get to the point where I critique the idea of climate anxiety, but I really value the fact that it's enabled us to have the discussion at all, about emotions in the way that we have, which is more from a position of What's the harm that's being done to people psychologically? How can we help? How can we heal those harms as opposed to, Hey, how can we jack this up so that people--
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, set up the conditions just right like we're mice in a cage. Right.
Charles Ogunbode: So [laughter] just [laughter] exactly. So that's the part that I would say I really appreciate about it. So I don't-- yeah, perhaps there's a self-oriented thing about humans to care about that. Well, I don't apologize for caring about people. I do care about humans.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Well, and also there's-- maybe it's a false choice to have to say, I either hate humans, and therefore, anything that we do to increase human welfare is somehow anti-environmental, and therefore, I don't want to do it, versus, that is just the only way through is through humans. Yeah. So I think that maybe we are holding up a false binary, right?
Charles Ogunbode: I agree. I agree. I'm very sure in reality, it's not quite so binary, but I can see-- I can with the-- word, and I sympathize with the notion of just maybe decenter in humans for a bit, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Humans are so inclined to center themselves, whether you want to call that nature or nurture, I won't get into why we do that. But I mean, think capitalism and Western therapy models reinforce that. So we know for sure that that's kind of, as I always like to say, the water we're swimming in. But, you know, the work to decenter humans is in itself, inner work. You have to kind of figure out why you're centering yourself. You know, Buddhism does this, right? Like, how do you extinguish yourself? Well, you have to do some exploration in the self to get there, ironically or paradoxically. So yes, I like this, the messiness of it.
And I also think there's so much in conservation work and environmental and climate work. There's so much misanthropy, which I've talked about in the show before, but this kind of hatred of humans, that the turn to climates emotions, as you've just described it, I just really want to underscore it. The turn to climate emotions or emotions is a little bit of a help towards curing some of that misanthropy, because the misanthropy does so much harm. So that's not doing us any good. So thank you for that. I love that answer. You've really got me thinking about this tension with my students. I'm like, why am I having a hard time with what the student is saying? And so thank you for helping me chew on that. I would love to hear more about the turn towards climate emotions, too, in the sense that, you know, you described sort of your experience with conservation work, thinking that psychology was the way to do that.
But the turn towards psychology, or turns towards emotion also has been described by lots of folks as also very privileged, that people who are not-- who are thinking about just then the interior life of climate change, like climate anxiety or climate trauma, um, you know, for a moment, we'll just uphold that notion that the mental health side of things is somehow really different than the physical health side of climate change. But even the decision to look at emotions instead of policy, or emotions instead of wildlife conservation, or emotions instead of even science or engineering or something, is somehow only something that the privileged will do, and this has been reflected in the proliferation of research coming out of weird countries, Western countries, right, around climate emotions.
What-- you have done so much in your research to correct that or to fill that gap. You've thought so deeply about this. You're probably the person thinking most deeply that I know about this. And I'm just wondering if you could introduce listeners to where you're going with that, you know, 'cause one could say the turn towards emotions is kind of only for the privileged. But your work really shows not or shows yes and I don't know. Go for it.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, no, I probably would not. I mean, well, the first thing is, I think there are lots of people who are thinking very deeply about this. We approach this in different ways, and we come at it from different backgrounds and, you know, engaged in different elements of the question, I guess. But certainly, my work isn't going in the direction of saying, Oh, think about emotions in of itself is a privilege, but there's certain ways of doing it, that I think are associated more with the position of privilege. For example, you know, climate anxiety as a concept has been a very dominant frame within which we think about climate emotions, right?
And I think there are certain elements to at least what we understand to underline it. So certainly if you're in Europe and North America, that's also changing very fast, or certainly in the early days of the more recent emergence of the concept. It was very much driven by a sort of anticipated, you know, future climate change impact, so a very sort of abstract sense of loss for the vast majority of people who were participating in the conversation, at that point and even determining the parameters of what it means to be climate anxious.
And I feel like that argument about it being or that critique of it being a privileged thing applies certainly at that level. But. The conversation I've often had is because this makes me think of there was a review that was published recently, I think it was published in Global Environmental Change and it's probably the biggest review of climate anxiety research done so far, he covered everything. And a journalist wrote me and said, "Hey, do you want to comment on this? Because one of the things that we observed, reading through the analysis is there's very little research, if any, at all, from Africa." And I just wondered, you know, what do you think, do people in Africa experience climate anxiety or not?
And I thought, Well, this is the problem. The problem is you're asking the wrong question. The question is not do people in Africa feel climate anxiety. It's more, how do people in Africa feel about climate change? That's the more relevant question because, it's sort of like when you say, do they feel climate anxious, you've already set the point of reference, and it's very much a Western based point of reference. And then it's like how far away or close are you to this thing that's familiar to us, as opposed to, this is a global problem, this is a global experience. What's it like for you?
So that's the question my research is trying to answer. So I think with the big study we did looking at 32 people in 30 countries and measuring the climate anxiety, the idea was just established. Look, this isn't something that's just limited to North America and Europe. This is a global experience. But I think the key message from the paper, which didn't get picked up as much, is that it's not so much about whether people feel distressed or not. Obviously, the problem is real. It's out there. People experience on the day to day. You would be mad not to be distressed by it. But what's really interesting, though, is the counterbalance to the distress is having this sense of agency and having the opportunity to be able to act on your distress.
And that is not, you know, equally available around the world. You know, for the majority, the global majority, the political opportunities, the economic, you know, environments that allows you to actually be able to act in your distress is not available. It's not an option. And that's the thing that we really need to be thinking about, because I feel like that in itself, Well, for me, it's interesting to me because it brings together two topics that I find very interesting, climate emotions on one hand, and climate justice on the other. The distribution of the means to act on your distress is a justice issue in itself. But that part of the study it didn't really get picked up as much as the Oh, everyone feels climate anxious.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Well, let's talk about it more because I love that part of it, and I, too, think of-- I try to think of the work I'm trying to do as bringing together these two areas, too, which is one of the reasons why I follow what you're doing. But I think that in addition to saying that the context in which you then can act on your climate distress is really just is uneven across geography, across different government style I mean, in a democracy, you'd have a very different situation than not. How much economic power you have, the agency question, right? The efficacy question around, can you do anything about it and therefore alleviate the feelings? It doesn't just say-- that doesn't just answer the question, well, how do we help people and support them through their climate emotions, or distress, or however you wanna-- whatever word you want to use, which is actually something I want to pick up on, also. But it doesn't just do that.
It also, might also shape how people feel about it to begin with. And I'm curious if you've had thoughts, right? So if you don't feel like you can be efficacious about something causing you distress, That doesn't just mean you're sort of stalled out. It actually might have like a kind of circular feedback loop on shaping what you actually feel about it. I mean, I think this is-- people have studied that in terms of apathy.
Like, I think about Renee Lertzman’s work in the US about apathy, or denial not being really about denial, but really being about, I can't do anything about it, so the easier thing to do is denial, the kind of elegant cognitive solution when you don't have efficacy. And so the emotion that you actually feel is a result of whether or not you feel you have efficacy or not, rather than the emotion comes first and then the efficacy question comes second.
Charles Ogunbode: Yes. Yeah, no, I think that's a really interesting point that you raise. And yeah, part of my education in climate emotions was a lot about reading people like Renee Lertzman’s work, and Kari Norgaard was another really.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Especially to Norway. I was thinking. You were in Norway in 2019?
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, I did meet her in Norway, actually. I met her in Norway. She's a lovely lady.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: She's a Humboldt grad, and so we proudly-- she writes about a lot of stuff locally, so we proudly call her one of our people.
Charles Ogunbode: Oh, she's amazing. She's amazing.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: She is. I have to have her on the show. Yeah. Now you make me think, I'm going to bring her on the show. [laughter]
Charles Ogunbode: No, you must, you must. She's excellent. Yeah, I think it's a really good point about what the imbalance between efficacy and distress does to people, because it's one of the questions that we're exploring within the work that we're doing right now. So, the projects I've been working for the last couple of years, we are looking particularly young people in West Africa, and we're looking at people of color in the UK. And it's very much engaging with the substructural context of people's engagement with climate change and the feelings about climate change. And particularly in West Africa, you see this, right? So, it's a very complicated scenario where when you speak to people and say, you know, what's going on around you? What changes have you perceived? How do you feel about it, et cetera, at the outset, people don't always have the language to say, Oh, I feel like it's climate change is the thing that I'm worried about.
So climate change as an issue, not necessarily. But you get into the conversation you're talking about, Oh, there's floods and there's the heat, and there's all this stuff that's going on, and the way people feel about it and things like that. And very soon, you get to that point where people invariably get like, Well, I'm really concerned about this, and I think this is a really big issue, and I'm concerned about what's happening right now, and what it's likely to develop into into the future, but I also don't feel like I can do anything because, you know, the government is corrupt, and there's poverty, and there's all these other challenges, and we can't really do anything. And that tends to go down two routes as far as I've observed. So the first route is just this sort of resignation. It's just kind of, well, there's nothing much I can do. And then but it doesn't end at well there's nothing I can do, so I forget about it. Rather, people reach for this sort of, but we are resilient people. You know, we have persisted through all sorts of challenges, and so we will. The narrative is almost like saying it out loud, reaffirms to yourself that I'm just going to keep plugging on. But there's also that unspoken recognition that, I don't know.
There is no real solid thing out there, that I can hold onto to say, for this reason, I believe it's going to be okay. But we are persistent people, we're resilient people. We will get through it. So that's that, on one hand. And then the other common experience I've observed is people basically, they become-- the more aware they become of climate change and they acquire that really broad global understanding of what this really represents. They become more distressed, but it just becomes-- it just becomes a sort of cycle of despair. So the more aware you are, obviously, along with that also comes an awareness of the lack of agency and the lack of control you have over what's going on, and its awareness becomes the distress in itself. It's separate from the reality of the issue. It's almost like there is a curse of knowledge.
And that's one thing that I'm very keen to shed-- So we've got an article that's underway describing a bit of that, and I'm really keen to draw attention to it, because there's still a lot of environmental communicators out there, particularly in Africa, where there's this notion of, oh, people don't have adequate knowledge, and we just need to educate them. We need to inform them. We've got to be really careful about what that knowledge can do because sometimes, I mean, I don't want to say it's better not to know, [laughter] but there's a responsibility to also kind of provide support to stop people from falling into this kind of distress arises from the knowledge.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I mean, this goes to this question of, all we need is more climate literacy. Climate literacy leads to climate efficacy, climate care, climate action. That is way oversimplified, as you're describing it. And I really I want to pick up on something that maybe just my own personal thing I find interesting about what you've said, and I hope listeners also can go down this journey with us. This is a little rabbit hole. But you said something about, they may not be before they get the climate literacy, in the interviews you described, they might say something like floods, or this or that, or weather events, or whatever it is that they're experiencing.
Like, their embodied selves perceive a risk in the environment. Whereas climate change, by its definition, you can't actually perceive that thing. You can only perceive its effects like a flood, or a hurricane, or heat, right? So these are what are often called knock-on effects or whatever. So it's sort of a fascinating thing to think, yes, they rightfully they are rightly perceiving the knock-on effects. They are rightly not perceiving climate change. Do we-- does it actually help, to have them also know the story, the climate literacy story of that thing you're experiencing is a result of climate change over there?
Charles Ogunbode: Yes.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Okay.
Charles Ogunbode: Yes, it is. Yes. So, and the reason why, and that's also really evidenced in the work that we're doing right now, which is that the people who have that framework of climate change in the technical sense, are the constructs we've been playing way to try to make sense of this is this notion of conceptual deprivation, but I haven't committed to it fully, because the origin of the concept kind of locates the deficit in the individual.
And that's not really where I'm going with it at all. What I'm trying to get to with this notion of conceptual deprivation is that the very systems that are supposed to support frontline communities, the institutions that are supposed to support them, lack the concepts to be able to accurately recognize and interpret the experiences of frontline communities.
So, the conceptual deprivation idea came from a lady called Ditte Jurisic. And she proposes in the sense that, knowing what to do with your distress, and knowing-- having the hermeneutical equipment to be able to make sense of your experience, has a huge role to play in what that distress becomes. You know, if we talk about instrumenting your distress, the way we talk about, oh, climate anxiety should be like fuel for action. You can only do that if you have the tools to interpret your distress as climate anxiety.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I love this. Okay.
Charles Ogunbode: Right. So that's kind of the anger, and I totally agree with that. The first time I read that paper, I thought this makes so much sense. It's a really good. It's a really good idea.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I mean, I'm chewing on this myself, right? How do people get to even, like, the mechanisms that require people to come to climate anxiety or distress are so complex. That's the punchline. Yeah.
Charles Ogunbode: Exactly.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And I find it fascinating.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. But it's like we underestimate the sort of structurally embedded nature of the mechanisms that bring those there in the first place. So when people say, Oh, climate anxiety is just a rational response, that's the other thing I find kind of problematic. I'm like, rational to who? It's only rational because you're operating within this kind of system where A leads to B, leads to C, and you're here. But when you're operating from a different reference point, the rational sequence doesn't always bring you to climate.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Especially if you don't have efficacy.
Charles Ogunbode: It might bring you somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It might take you somewhere else. So with the West African population, I think the African context more broadly. This is probably, you know, really quite relevant, like more relevant, is that we need to give people the language, and we need to give them this frameworks, just so that they can engage with the institutions that are supposed to support them.
So if the-- let's say your government, or your community workers, or your mental health support system, or even well, one area I'm really interested in is how we translate psychological distress, how we evidence it as a form of loss and damage. So how do we make this psychic impact visible within the loss and damage policy landscape?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Beautiful. And just for listeners who might not know what loss and damage is, Yeah, class. It's a very important climate justice key term in case--
Charles Ogunbode: A very, very important framework because it's a system that's been set up basically to account for climate change impacts that are beyond what people or what communities can reasonably adapt to. So, how do we compensate communities for losses that are incurred as a consequence of climate change impact?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: The countries who have benefited the most from fossil fuel extraction, do they have an obligation to pay for…
Charles Ogunbode: To pay for losses. Yes.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Thank you.
Charles Ogunbode: And so we're experimenting with this idea that there are some psychological impacts, and I'll get to this. I'm really jumping around now.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: No, I'm with you. I love it.
Charles Ogunbode: Just so much going up in my head.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: This is what I wanted for this conversation. It's not linear. Not linear.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. So there's this, and I'll flesh this out a bit more properly later on. But there is an idea about, this sort of progressive erosion of psychological resources and social resources that I would-- I would argue constitute a loss to a community. It's not something you regain or you recoup. It's just a progressive loss of those resources. And how do we make that visible within the loss and damage policy mechanism? So that's one of the that's the main sort of goal that we've got within the research program.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And do you have any ideas about that? I'd love to know what you're coming up with answers to that. How do you?
Charles Ogunbode: Well, we were kind of halfway there. The program is soft core designed with partners in West Africa and working with communities as well. So it's one of those things where it's not your standard kind of academic research projects. It's really back and forth and [laughter] it's been a lot of fun.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, yeah. Do we need climate literacy at all?
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, I wouldn't call it climate literacy. I really despise climate literacy--.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Good.
Charles Ogunbode: --Because in there is a colonial thing built into that. I'll come to that, also. But basically, the way I think about it is that people need to have the language to be able to interface with formal institutions. The global setup and the national level setup around climate policy and adaptation and programs, those kind of things. They have that colonialism infused, whatever structures, they are what they are.
But frontline communities need support now. They need resources now, to be able to adapt, to be able to they need compensation for those losses. So we need to equip them to be able to interface with those institutions and get the support that they need. So that's the way I come to think about it. So, I'm not coming from the perspective of, oh, you lack knowledge, and so now I need to educate you. No. It's the thing is communities have such a good understanding. They have such good ecological understanding. Much better than law scientists. But it's more about that, Hey, let's figure out how to navigate.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I really appreciate that because this correction around the deficit model around information deficit, which is Kari Norgaard, really brings that up in Living in Denial. Which I'll put in the show notes and bring her on.
But this idea that this community doesn't know about climate change, they only know about their experiences of poverty or famine or whatever, and therefore they don't have climate anxiety, they don't have climate literacy, and in order to get them empowered and to solve their problems, they need to get educated. That kind of condescension, patronizing paternalistic deficit mindset, being very colonial. But that doesn't mean that there is some utility to them getting resources if they learn the language of these systems and institutions, and learn how to articulate their distress in these categories, including something like climate anxiety. Or moral injury or loss and damages. This is the kind of language that's getting attention and getting institutional resources to flow, you know?
So yeah, I appreciate that. That's-- you're threading the needle of that and pushing back on. I love what you said about I don't really like that statement that if you're feeling climate anxiety, you're just having a rational response to the state of the world. It's so much more complicated than that, even though that's a beautiful validation because I do think that toxic positivity culture, at least in the US Yeah. Maybe in the UK, although the UK is a little bit more, everybody should be grumpy and if you're not grumpy what's wrong with you? [laughter] We, [laughter] imagine. So yeah, I get that. There's a little more US-based kind of toxic positivity that any kind of validation of any kind of "negative emotion" feels good, you know, feels like a relief.
If you're just joining us right now, I'm speaking with Dr. Charles Ogunbode about climate emotions around the world, and specifically in Africa right now.
We can turn towards other research that you're doing. I know that you are really giving this kind of attention, and I'm loving this conversation, we can keep going on this conversation. But you mentioned in your-- in the work that you're doing, and I didn't even realize that you're doing this work, but you have a project called Media Exposure, Climate Anxiety, and Mental Health Project.
I often feel really upset with people who talk about crises of mental health, first of all, and separate it from physical health. Again, I don't think it does us any service when we're trying to bring a climate justice orientation to mental health. Whether this is around youth, especially, like, thinking about the anxious generation from Jonathan Height's work or, you know, the ex-US Surgeon General.
So, real quick, before I keep going with that question, do you want to say anything more about what we were saying about any of that? I feel like there was more there, but I don't want to force you to dig it up.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, I mean, it's a great conversation because it touches on--.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: So many things.
Charles Ogunbode: --So many things that I've had so many--.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Please go. Keep going. I don't want to stop.
Charles Ogunbode: --sort of hot buttons for me. So I think the literacy one, for example, because I'd been thinking about that for so long, because a lot of the risk perception work kind of led to that point. And there was one big paper in particular, I remember, I think it was from about 2011 or something. It was a nature climate change paper looking at risk perception around the world, and one of the big recommendations was people need education. People just need to be educated so they understand.
And I thought to myself, I mean, just thinking about us as an African person, if we think about the fact that number one, the dominant language of climate science is English and French. And how does English and French-- how they arrived in Africa, is via colonialism. So essentially, the people who haven't heard about climate change, the people who this study say, Oh, you know, we've got to reach out to these people essentially you can think of them as people who haven't had a lot of exposure to formal education. So they're kind of outside-- they're farther out of the colonial system of knowing. So essentially, the recommendation when you say, Oh, let's make it more literate, really means let's bring in more of these people into that system. It's not, Hey, let's think about how they think about it, and let's come up with concepts that connects with their own experiences. No, it's let's take this one Western science, which is the only true way of knowing, and let's spread it.
And-- but we do need to equip people with the concept to be able to operate in that system because it's such a dominant and powerful institution. And yes, I would love to, and I will work to undermine that, and break it down, and have a fair and more equitable system. But in the meantime, before we get there, let's at least give the frontline communities and the people who are most impacted by this crisis the tools to be able to get the support that they need.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, and I'm curious, too. I mean, to go to this question of, what is the knowledge they already carry? They already have ecological knowledge. You know, there's a deficit model of-- the colonial deficit model that they don't know the thing and they need to know the thing. What would you say, in terms of emotions?
One of the things I find just really interesting, and I'm thinking of the work of like Batja Mesquita's book Between Us: How Culture Shapes Emotions. I mean, there's probably a lot. You are probably way more deeply immersed in this research than I am, but I find that research really interesting about how different cultural contexts actually shape what emotions are even available to you. And so, this sort of projection or application of a Western model of universal emotions, you know, you know, the emotion wheel, or social emotional learning, or whatever, happy faces mean this and sad faces mean that, universally. You know, and lots of people--.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: --Who are doing the most cutting edge sort of social psychological research, understand that that model doesn't work anymore. But maybe you could for listeners who aren't geeking out on that stuff like you and I might be, can you explain how that might help in thinking about decolonizing the climate emotions research in the way that you're trying to do?
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. So yeah, I think I mean, the climate emotions wheel, for example, we've kind of we've used it in our research and as a way to kind of speak to that work, to say, you know, where does it-- What does it help us understand? And then what's left? How do we cover the rest of it? And where that's kind of led me with my research is towards the direction of thinking, it feels less important to be able to put a name to the specific or the discrete emotions types and forms that people are feeling as opposed to the processes that bring about the emotional experiences.
So that's kind of where we've kind of gone with our work. So one thing about when I say this is so with our-- so there are two studies. When I talk about the work we're in West Africa, two studies that of bleed into one another. So a couple of years ago, we worked with Jennifer Uchendu, who I think has been on your podcast before, our organization and four others across five West African cities.
And we just ask people about, you know, what they're experiencing with the environment, and the way they feel about that. And it was-- they were very good interviews because they're very free ranging, people were talking about all sorts of stuff. And some of it, you could tie back to climate change. A lot of it was just things like, Oh this oh, this waste pollution or this people just behave in a certain ways, like social-- when people think about environment, we're talking about, more like a social environment.
But there's a lot going on in those conversations. One of the things that we found really interesting that we pulled out that was really useful for thinking about climate emotions is that well, there are two things. The first thing is that people tend to talk about their experience of environmental impacts using sort of embodied language. So people very rarely said, you know, I feel really sad because of the stuff that's going on.
But they will spend a lot of time talking about things like, you know, my skin burns because of this heat that I'm exposed to. And then obviously you can infer from the experience of operating in these conditions every day, going to school, going to work, you maybe-- some of these people interviewed were tradespeople working in open markets. You know, they're under-- they're exposed to these conditions all the time, and they talk about those bodily impacts, or they talk about things like that.
There's one quote as well that really stayed in my mind I thought was really interesting was this person took quite a bit of time to describe to us the feeling of their house is flooded during the rainy season. And she said, you know, can you imagine what it's like to get up, you know, off your bed, you put your feet down in floodwaters in your bedroom? And can you imagine the feeling of defeat that you have from that?
It's kind of like, where do I begin, to get my life back in order. And there's a lot of the descriptions that very much speak to the physical sensation of being impacted by climate change, the immediacy of it. And I feel like when we abstract it all to that cognitive experience, that effective description, there is a layer of that. There's a grown narrative that's lost. And so by paying more attention to that embodied element of it, I thought was really useful. But, there's so much going on in there. You couldn't put a single name to it. It's not just climate anxiety, or worry, or distress. There's so many things go up in there.
We've ended up with trying to think about embodied climate distress as a way to sort of describe it. But it's also not just about the embodiment. The other element to that that was really distinct from other climate emotion constructs that are already out there, was also the relational elements. I know people have made lots of arguments about how, you know, climate emotions is inherently-- also are inherently relational, but it's so fundamental to the way people were describing their experiences in West Africa, lots of people talk about, Oh, yeah, you know, this happened to a relative or a neighbor or whatever.
And, you know, number one, you know, I felt really sad because I empathize with the situation, or I felt really drained because, you know, from supporting them. I also got this physical kind of just being drained, physical-- psychological distress, you know, indirectly from this other person's experience. But the thing that makes this significance in the West African context, though, is that it's not just empathy in the way that when we-- the Western literature and empathy tend to think about it as a sort of individual quality, something that is in the person. Whereas the way people talk about it in West Africa, there is... Even though people don't talk about this explicitly, there is a cultural structure that shapes you to operate like that. And it makes me think about, you know, things like Ubuntu, the idea of I am because we are. And inherent in that is this idea that a person is a person because of the other people that they're connected to.
So, I feel a thing not just because of the significance of the implications for me, but the implications for people that I care about and people that I'm connected with. So, it makes it much more I don't know, it's just a richer, more powerful manifestation of climates emotions to work with. But it also doesn't lend itself to a very simple way. It's not easy to just package it into a scale. That's what we've sort of encountered so far. And the one practical implication of it is that, naturally, it doesn't-- when you think about people's emotional experiences of environmental impacts and climate impacts that way, it never leads to this direction of Let's do some therapy or something. Because it's whole communities. How do you do that? The intervention points are very structural.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And does that lead to-- I mean, this is all of a sudden as I want to say the question, I'm realizing this is a stupid, individualistic, Western question, but does that lead to a greater or lesser sense of efficacy, or is that the wrong question?
Charles Ogunbode: It doesn't-- it has no bearing on the sense of efficacy or not. Yeah. Because, and this is the reason why. So again, coming from my background in risk, you know, I've always thought, efficacy is great, and collective efficacy is really important. If you highlight the fact that we're all in this together, we're all filling this together, then you should get a boost from knowing, oh, I'm not the only one who's dealing with this. We're all dealing with this.
But what that way of thinking doesn't account for, which is a very, you know, common feature of community life and collective life in African contexts is that, when you're part of a network or part of a collective that as a whole is subject to this progressive erosion, progressive decline in resources, there is no-- there is nothing-- you can't draw from the experiences of others to gain a sense of agency because you're all experiencing that. It's just a collective decline.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, that's really powerful. And it's all of a sudden, you know, I have thought in the past that in all of the research that I had done around climate anxiety and how to solve this problem with my students, which is really what my first book on this topic was about, got me even into this. I started to realize all the gaps in those assumptions and all of very-- the ways that the things that would solve those problems, and the sort of hero's journey arc archetype that I would sort of interpret what was going on with my students, were super Western.
And one of the ways that you're helping me tease out another layer of that here, is in-- which is sort of like the how culture shapes emotion argument, and you're really unpacking it, that, with the Ubuntu concept, right, you don't even feel-- you don't feel anxiety about any particular thing, whether it's climate or whatever, in isolation in those contexts. You feel them in the context of something that is collectively happening.
And you don't even-- I mean, in that sense, there is not a therapeutic model outcome of that, as you pointed out. And also, the language for what that emotion would be or the structural intervention that would need to come of it, as opposed to thinking about efficacy. The structural intervention that would come of it, has to have language that makes sense to the places where there are resources. And that's kind of your point.
And I'm just sort of wondering, you know, your back to your sort of research that you're doing on how to leverage these emotional responses, mental health consequences, however you want to describe it, the distress of climate change for resources. How do you measure it to make loss and damages possible? I love the question, but it also does make me wonder, is climate really the frame for these communities that you're researching if that's not really the shared language?
Charles Ogunbode: No, it's not the frame. So people in general, yeah, this is also a bit of a tricky line, really in these conversations, because people recognize these challenges that they're facing as really long standing developmental issues. Neglect, like, you know, political and social neglect of frontline communities by varying levels of government and leadership. I mean, that is actually a very strong theme. This feeling of abandonment is a really common theme that comes through as well.
When people talk about, you know, oh, my communities have experience, X, Y and Z. It's very much, well, we are a small community or we are this discrete communities that have just been abandoned by people in power, or people with resources or influence, et cetera. And that was common to all the different cities that we interviewed people in. Um, and so, no, that language isn't there.
It's certainly not the default that people would come to that conversation with. But the reason why I think climate change is a really important one to bring into the conversation anyway, or to engage people to see how they can relate to, is that it's very much-- it gets a lot of focus, right? And also, I think for a long time in Africa, the climate research has tended to think about I guess what some people might consider more concrete problems, like, Oh, how do we, I don't know, help the agricultural sector, get people to produce more food or help make sure people get sufficient water, that sort of thing. But we-- in my research, I'm mainly focused on urban communities. And the reason why I'm looking at urban communities is number one, Africa is urbanizing really rapidly, so a much greater proportion of people now live in cities compared with rural areas. And climate change also is contributing to that, because declining in agricultural yields, et cetera is forcing young people to move into cities, so that's a big part of it.
Um, and then the second part of it was I often think to myself, Well, people, you know, can have food, and have drink, and still have no quality of life at all. So, it seems like a very low aspiration to just be like, let's just keep these people alive. I think we can aspire to more than that. And so that's where, again, the well being framing comes in. So well being really is what we're interested in. How do we maximize the well being of people? How do we support communities as a whole to thrive and be a place where people live, you know, well?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Okay, thank you. I am thinking on multiple different levels now about climate, anxiety, these two words. Are they useful? What do they carry? In what context are they produced out of culture and experience? So you're having me think about these things.
I'm going to shift gears here to another one of your pieces of research. You've got lots of pieces here. I mean, you're prolific beyond any human being can follow it, much less produce it and how you do it.
Charles Ogunbode: I have my co authors to thank for that.
[laughter]
Sarah Jaquette Ray: --Or any of the other, in our time-- in our limited life if we had only one question left, which one would you like?
Charles Ogunbode: I think, that, the media exposure one is quite interesting because that's the one that 32 countries study came out of. And I have to say, I'm not going to take any credit for the media aspect of it. We happened to be a consortium of people when we started, that included myself and my colleague Rouven Doren, who are environmental psychologists. We had Maria Ojala as well in the group, who was a psychologist. And then we had another group of guys who were media people, but they were also really interested in climate anxiety and its emergence at that point, thinking, Hey, what's going on? Why are people, you know, suddenly, you know, why is this? What's going on with people? And they had this idea that it was something to do with the media that people were exposed to. It was a sort of yeah, basically media driven phenomenon, just like people are now start to describe their worry in those terms because the media has given them the terminology was kind of the idea, I guess. Yeah, so we did some analysis around that. I haven't had a huge focus on the role of media, but I also think there is an unfair self criticism that's made there about Advertising, I think you had a quote about linking to... what's his name? Jonathan--.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Haidt, yeah the anxious generation.
Charles Ogunbode: --On anxiety. Yeah, there's this thing about, you know, the social media is making people depressed--
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That's going--.
Charles Ogunbode: --And the media. It's the same kind of narrative. And when I see that, what I often think to myself is, well, you're just focusing on the wrong thing. So media means that people or the spread of the media, the growth of social, et cetera, means that more people are able to see what's going on in the world. They're able to perceive the problem because it's made visible to them through those platforms. So the solution or the intervention, to my mind, anyway, is not fixing the media. It's fixing the problems that are now being transmitted to everyone by the media because those problems are out there for real. So we're talking about climate change--
Sarah Jaquette Ray: We don't shoot the messenger. Yeah. Yeah.
Charles Ogunbode: Exactly. You know, if you're like, Oh, my God, the young people are so anxious about climate change, and it's because of all this media consumption. Uh.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: No, it's the climate change.
Charles Ogunbode: Media is covering climate change because the world is breaking down. [laughter] So I feel like there's always been a little bit of that in there. And indeed, with multiple-- we've got even with the research we're doing right now, over and over, the evidence shows that media exposure is a really big part of the underlying cause of climate anxiety. A lot of it comes from that. You know, for the vast majority of people, suddenly in the South Europe and North America, and I will qualify that by saying we've had a wild summer. And I feel like that data, might you know, might look very different next year. But up till this summer, a lot of it has been driven by media coverage, because now we're not only aware of what's happening around where we are locally, but you're also aware of what's happening more broadly.
And also, when we think about, you know, people have connections to different parts of the world. We live in, you know, multicultural societies where people have links to frontline communities in various parts of the world. And I think it's all of that that's kind of coming together and driving climate anxiety. Um.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I mean, this idea that media is the cause of it, and we I mean, the one thing I would say about that, though, I'm curious what you think about this, is that media has particular algorithms that gravitate towards filtering certain types of stories that probably should be fixed, and that that is designed, I want to go on the limb and say, I think it's designed to make people feel really defeated and not feel efficacious. I mean, if efficacy is our goal, which as we talked about already, we don't know if that's always our goal. But if efficacy is our goal, in other words, that is the feeling that we need to have in order to stay engaged for the long term of this marathon of a problem, this life project, as you put it earlier. Do we need to have-- do we need to consume stories and live in a medial landscape that is a little bit designed to support us better? I don't know. I don't know.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. No, I think that's a really good question. I mean, yes, we definitely need-- yeah, we do need-- I mean, even looking beyond climate change, we need a serious care fix in the media ecosystem.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I love that, a serious care fix.
Charles Ogunbode: A lot of that-- No, it's really, it's beyond-- it's beyond chronic deficit in that now. Um, so we do need that. But I think, yeah, the question is basically, what should that look like? I'm not a huge fan of the whole, let's just put out a lot of, I don't know, solutions focused stuff. Let's just show people people acting around the world, and that's going to do it, because it's not. Well, I mean, basically, it's just not true, that that's going to solve the entirety of the problem. I mean, that is a part of what we need to get us where we want to be.
But in the same way that we think about loss and damage and think about things that are beyond adaptation, I think there is also a sort of psychological adaptation, which people like, um, Susan Clayton has written about this. Joseph Reser, who I think is retired now, also wrote quite a bit about psychological adaptation.
And I think a part of our psychological adaptation is just kind of getting used to this world that looks very different from what we live in right now. Some of that is going to include some loss, and some of that will also include, I think, some gains of some things that we maybe-- you know, it takes time to process that stuff. There are lots of things that we want to hold on to in the world we have right now.
And this is bringing me to, um, And I'm not going to reproduce this argument very well, but Jason Hickel had this idea that less is more kind of paradigm. And I feel like there-- there's some good stuff that will come out of the things that we lose from the current world. And so we need the kind of ecosystem that allows us to process those things, to process that almost psychological adaptation transformation. But it shouldn't be based on let's just pump out hope. Let's just pump out action. That's not really.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: This is really, I mean, this is making me go down paths like Vanessa Andreotti's work around “hospicing modernity,” and Báyò Akómoláfé's work too, just thinking of--.
Charles Ogunbode: The post activism.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, that this a--.
Charles Ogunbode: I love--
Sarah Jaquette Ray: The framework of more hope, more efficacy, your distress is a rational response, more climate literacy, more solutions media, or shoot the messenger entirely media ban it. This kind of paternalism about protect the children, but make sure they're abundantly climate literate. The models that you've interrogated in this conversation already, all of those things, are sort of thrown into question with some of these other scholars too. And I'm sort of I mean, not can-- that we're going to get to a tidy answer in our hour long conversation.
But what's the sort of punch line take home here? If we don't have any of those things, and we're hospicing modernity, we need to psychologically adapt to and embrace some of the beautiful things that will happen. I think of Rebecca Solnit's work here, too. She often talks about, you know, we're going to have freedom from polluted air, you know, we're going to have-- You know, don't think about the sacrifices it would take to fix climate change. Think about the sacrifices it takes to not fix it and the gains we get by fixing it. That's kind of her way of talking about a similar argument. I'm just curious, where-- what is the invitation here that we should leave our listeners with that all of this thinking kind of adds up to 'cause, I just love it. It's hard to put a tidy bow around it.
Charles Ogunbode: Yeah. Yeah, I'm-- yeah, I'm kind of struck 'cause I guess I'm also at that point in my thinking and my work where it's I'm sitting with the uncertainty of the outcome or even-- forget about the outcome of the past. And I'm just yeah, and that's why that idea of knowing ourselves, really appeals to me, because it pairs very well with building connection and dialogue. The process of getting to know ourselves better. We become more connected through the process of getting to know ourselves. We are able to have dialogue. And I think that's a big part of what's missing, in the world. I think a lot of the problems come down to that. There's a lot of itemization, and fragmentation, and factions.
And when you mentioned Bayo [Akomalafe] just now, I really love this idea of the post activism, and we've hit the limits of what activism can do. And as much as I'm very engaged with justice research and, you know, it's a core part of my work, I struggle with that part of the justice scholarship around activism because I think we need to become more creative in how we promote justice in ways that are centered around those relational ties.
B-- Yeah. So yeah, so basically, those are the kinds of ideas that I've been I'm trying to connect to through my work, is this idea that we should get comfortable with not being so certain about the answers and, you know, maybe not hold on so strongly to the certain answers that we have right now because they are not necessarily very accurate, very, yeah, I don't think they actually, they're not as certain as they are, or as we like to think that they are. And I think it's fine, to not have a certain answer to where we're going and where this climate breakdown--
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I really appreciate that on the one hand, you're saying, I'm going to use my research to give people tools, to get resources, using the language and the will to certainty, and the will to control, that you also at the same time hold in another hand, absolutely reject and know is just a false narrative that it's on its way out. So I really love that-- [laughter] --in your work and everything you've described. Yeah, thank you so much for talking with me, Charles.
Charles Ogunbode: Thank you. No, thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah. No. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Appreciate it.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Thank you so much, Charles, for talking with me.
Charles Ogunbode: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Sarah. Thank you so much. Really, really enjoyed talking to you.
