Exploring Our Shared Grief, Joy, and Hope through Climate Cafés

07/10/2025 

Love, joy, grief, and frustration. A climate café is about making space for people to come together, and express all of these conflicting emotions. It’s the small hour of time set aside to reflect and explore what sustains us as we navigate the realities of demanding and shaping a just transition. One that is democratic, equitable, and community led.  

A climate café is for everyone. But it’s particularly useful for those who want to share their concerns in more informal settings, and build a stronger political voice on climate over time. Most importantly, climate cafes serve to actively build the collective care, awareness, and solidarity that we need to check in with one another, stay informed, and draw on coordinated efforts that ensure climate commitments are not scaled back or, in some cases, completely withdrawn.  

As frontline, marginalised, and Indigenous communities continue to experience the greater burden of climate and environmental injustice, they are faced with deeper levels of climate grief and eco-anxiety. Climate grief can be understood as the loss and despair that we feel as we witness or experience suffering from extreme climate events and disasters, the loss of human and more-than-human life, and the collapse of ecosystems.  Eco-anxiety refers to a chronic fear and worry for the consequences of inaction or delay as we cross critical planetary boundaries that allow life as we know it to continue.  

The grief, anger, and anxiety that is experienced by us all is a normal response to widespread injustice and harm. It is an additional emotional and physical toll that is placed on groups who have been historically oppressed and are systemically excluded and disadvantaged. Communities most connected to nature, working with and living off the land, are most exposed to and affected by ecological loss and damage brought about by climate change.  

For example, smallholder farmers in Chepuri, the Upper West Region of Ghana which is a climate-sensitive region, are experiencing grief and helplessness as their livelihoods are threatened, biodiversity loss is worsened by illegal logging, commercial charcoal production, droughts, and unpredictable rainfall patterns, and high levels of food insecurity and undernutrition persist. Families who have farmed for generations, inheriting and passing down Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, now find themselves unable to predict weather patterns and prepare for the seasons ahead.  

Climate grief and anxiety is so quickly triggered as not one single aspect of our lives – energy, housing, food, water, the air we breathe and the green and blue spaces that we enjoy and cherish – is left untouched by environmental breakdown. As we grapple with these challenges, honouring our grief and anger, tapping into this as a source of energy, power, and purpose, and understanding that we are not acting alone, will determine how successful and united we can be in our climate and social justice efforts.    

As Bell Hooks, a renowned and widely celebrated scholar, activist, and author who closely examined the intersecting forms of oppression across race, gender, and class, centring the experiences of Black girls and women and advancing Black feminist thought, once said:  

‘We must love and care for each other as a radical act of resistance. The struggle for liberation is not simply an intellectual pursuit; it is a physical, emotional, and spiritual battle. Hope grows when we come together as a community, when we lean on each other in our shared struggle, and when we recognize that our collective joy is part of our resistance.’  

Bell Hooks, All About Love  

If you missed out on our last climate café, we hope you join us for the next one in December and for our upcoming events including a nature-walk and herbal tea making session with Hackney Herbal. Our next workshop on Climate and Health will take place in November, and tickets will be available very soon.