• Leslie Davenport

Our closing session brings together the threads of our shared learning, combining expressive arts and ecopsychology practices to deepen reflection and integration. This is a space to surface unanswered questions, harvest insights, and explore the guiding question: Where do we go from here? Participants will engage in small group networking with cohort members who share professional interests, creating opportunities to envision and plan future collaborations. Together, we’ll celebrate the connections formed, the skills developed, and the possibilities ahead, leaving with both a sense of closure and a foundation for ongoing partnership in climate-aware, community-focused work.

• Caroline Hickman

Children and young people have the greatest stake in addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis, yet adults often struggle with how to communicate the truth, often swinging between overprotection and overwhelming honesty. This course explores how to hold that tension with care, validating young people’s fears while supporting their resilience. As youth around the world take to the streets and courts to demand action, we’ll examine how adult responses of defensiveness, guilt, and grief shape intergenerational dialogue. Drawing on global research from the UK, US, Philippines, Maldives, and Europe, the course explores the psychological impacts of climate change on children, including the rise of climate anxiety. We’ll also look at youth-led legal efforts in the European Court of Human Rights that frame climate inaction as a violation of children’s rights. Together, we’ll consider how to create emotionally honest, developmentally appropriate, and justice-oriented approaches to supporting young people in a climate-altered world.

• Leslie Davenport

This course offers a foundational understanding of the climate emergency: its causes, its wide-ranging mental health impacts, and the cultural and political systems that shape it. We’ll begin with a concise overview of climate science and the systemic environmental and social forces driving the crisis. From there, we’ll explore how these realities inform a climate-aware therapeutic stance, introducing skills that build resilience, sustain engagement, support activism, and strengthen self-regulation.

Key concepts in climate psychology will be introduced, including the unconscious processes that shape our beliefs, emotions, and behaviors around sustainability. We’ll examine evidence-based therapeutic approaches for addressing both the acute mental health impacts of environmental disasters and the chronic stress of a changing climate. Throughout, we’ll highlight our profound psychological and physical interdependence with the natural world and how this awareness can inspire both healing and action while also considering a new ethics of practice that extends therapeutic approaches into meaningful community engagement.

• Ariella Cook-Shonkoff

Our range of climate emotions is vast — anxiety about changing weather patterns, anger about government inaction, grief about biodiversity loss — and it can feel lonely to navigate them alone. This experiential course will explore the potential of art-making for expressing climate emotions, regulating the nervous system, creating meaning, and fostering agency and resilience. There are many avenues for incorporating art-making into climate work both professionally and personally while working within your scope of competency. By painting, ripping, drawing, and writing, participants will experience how to metabolize emotions through the creative process, revitalize a connection to others humans and the natural world, and ignite radical hope. 

• Theopia Jackson

This course emphasizes community-based, participatory approaches that are highly relevant to climate-related therapy. Rather than imposing outside solutions, the focus is on advocating for co-created healing practices rooted in community strengths, cultural identity, and historical context. The work centers models like Emotional Emancipation Circles and African-centered frameworks that address collective trauma and foster emotional resilience. The course highlights the importance of embedding care within community networks by training local facilitators and creating culturally resonant spaces for healing. These principles offer a roadmap for climate-engaged therapy: prioritize community-led, culturally responsive, and context-aware practices that support both individual and collective resilience. These approaches are particularly vital in addressing the disproportionate climate impacts on BIPOC and other marginalized communities, bridging emotional support with systemic justice.

• Leslie Davenport

This mid-point session provides an opportunity to pause, reflect, and integrate learning to date. We will introduce a clinically grounded resiliency practice designed to strengthen personal and professional capacity in climate-aware work. Participants will engage in group discussion and guided reflection to deepen understanding of the material presented so far, exploring its application in their unique contexts. The session also creates space to share feedback on the program’s structure, allowing for thoughtful adjustments that enhance the learning experience. Together, we’ll ensure the remainder of the course is responsive, relevant, and aligned with participant needs and goals.

• Anna Graybeal

The climate crisis evokes a wide range of responses: some people are overwhelmed with distress, while others avoid the topic altogether. As therapists, how do we navigate these divergent reactions, including our own, in clinical work?

This experiential workshop explores how group psychotherapy can support emotional resilience and relational repair in the face of climate disruption. Most of us weren’t taught how to express difficult feelings in constructive ways; instead, we learned to shut down or disconnect. Group therapy offers a powerful space to unlearn those patterns and build capacity for honest, connected dialogue.

Participants will explore key principles of group work and practice facilitation techniques that help people process climate emotions, whether intense or avoided, with greater tolerance and connection. We’ll also examine the distinctions between climate therapy groups and Climate Cafés, and how to skillfully facilitate each to meet the emotional needs of diverse participants.

• Andel Nicasio

This course offers an exploration of the core principles of community disaster mental health, emphasizing culturally responsive, trauma-informed approaches to support individuals and communities affected by extreme weather disasters and other large-scale disruptions. Unlike traditional therapy, which often focuses on individual, long-term treatment in clinical settings, disaster mental health requires providers to be prepared for rapid, flexible, and scalable interventions that meet people where they are, often in shelters, schools, or community centers. Participants will explore strategies for psychological first aid, crisis stabilization, and fostering resilience, with special attention to the needs of marginalized and underserved populations. The course highlights community engagement, local provider training, and collaborative care models that promote trust and recovery. It also addresses how to adapt evidence-based practices for diverse cultural contexts and reduce access barriers. This course equips participants to support collective healing and equitable recovery in times of crisis.

• Linda Thai

This course invites participants to reclaim secure attachment not only through human relationships but also through connection to land, ancestral traditions, and environmental kinship. Guided by the principles of “ReWilding the Soma” and “ReMembering,” we will explore how colonization has disrupted the body-land continuum and severed ancestral ties, and how we might begin to mend them. Through somatic practices, expressive arts, and ritual, we’ll engage in grief work that spans generations and cultures impacted by colonization, fostering the restoration of relational wholeness. At its heart, this framework calls us to move from individualism toward relational ecologies—reconnecting with Earth, ancestry, and chosen communities. By somatically recognizing how systems of oppression shape identity and regulation, we align with climate psychology’s broader commitment to social and ecological justice.

• Bayo Akomolafe

In this conversation with Bayo Akomolafe, he offers a radically different lens for engaging the climate crisis, one that moves beyond urgency, problem-solving, and human-centered control. Rooted in post-activism, decoloniality, and Yoruba cosmology, his work invites us to slow down, unlearn dominant narratives, and approach collapse not as an enemy to defeat but as an invitation to transformation. Rather than seeking immediate answers, he encourages us to dwell in uncertainty, compost outdated paradigms, and make space for the more-than-human world to think with us. This orientation challenges conventional activism and opens a path toward deeper relationality, humility, and emergent possibilities in times of ecological unraveling.

All accepted applicants will be able to select their program fee from the designated range, as well as choose their payment plan option. All accepted students are also eligible for payment plan options (one, two, or four installments) at no extra charge. 

As part of our mission to expand the field of climate psychology, CIIS has designated funds to offer two half $1,500 Scholarships and four partial $1,000 scholarships every cohort for those in financial need.

The Future Leader Scholarships are specifically for applicants who plan to use their climate psychology certification not only to expand their personal practice, but to pursue a leadership position within the field of climate psychology. Examples of this could include, but not be limited to:

• Developing programming to provide emotional support to climate activist organizations
• Conducting research into the mental health dimensions of the climate crisis
• Training clinicians on assessing and treating climate distress
• Working with existing community resources, including first responders, to increase awareness of mental health consequences of climate related disasters
• Developing climate curricula for schools
• Engaging in climate communications
• Providing behavioral science consultation to agriculture and land use work
• Working with environmental justice groups in BIPOC communities
• Integrating emotional sustainability themes in business or tech organizations

To apply, please upload a one-to-two page essay with your program application that answers the following questions:

• How will you pursue a leadership position within the field of climate psychology after you complete your training?
• How will you bring the climate psychology education you receive in this program to others in your professional and/or other communities?
• What is your financial situation and why are you applying for a scholarship?

Fall: A non-refundable application fee of $50 is due at the time of application. Payment of the program fee (or the first payment of your payment plan) must be received by September 1st, to secure your space in the program. Payment plans are available and will be provided to accepted applicants. If a student withdraws before October 1st, fifty percent of the full fee will be due. The full fee is due if a student withdraws after October 1.

Applicants will be notified within two weeks of the application deadline, or sooner.