Climate and Mental Health Action Partnership

Climate and Mental Health Action Partnership

Over the past year, Thrive LDN have been building a case within the London health and social care system for coordinated action across the intersections between climate, nature, and mental health.

This case was endorsed by the city’s senior health and social care leaders in March 2024. In response, in 2024/25, Thrive LDN is launching a Climate and Mental Health Action Partnership, which aims to:

• Create a London in which everyone – especially marginalised, excluded, and vulnerable groups – can take meaningful climate action in their communities while also improving their mental health

• Create more opportunities for communities to influence the people who make climate and mental health-related policies that affect them

• Create more opportunities for cross-sector collaboration on policy and activities with co-benefits for climate and mental health.

Climate, Environment and Mental Health Action Forum

As part of this agenda, Thrive LDN is convening a Climate, Environment and Mental Health Action Forum.

It will be a pan-London space to connect individuals and communities with multi-sector organisations to enable more effective, co-produced, and joined-up action on climate, nature and mental health.

Joining the forum

The next session is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, 2 October 2024 between 10am – 11.30am (online).

If you’d like to learn more and join the forum, please contact the Thrive LDN team.

About the forum

Endorsed and supported by a wide range of stakeholders and partners, who will make up some of the initial membership, it will centre voices of community representatives, those with lived experiences of mental ill health and those most deprived socio-economically.

The Forum’s scope and work will be shaped by its members. Based on initial conversations with stakeholders, the key aims are to:

• Create a supportive platform that helps members to learn from collective efforts and share intelligence and best practice

• Co-develop an associated work programme and identify resources to support this work’s development and implementation

• Focus support offers on those most deprived socio-economically and/ or belonging to communities who have historically been marginalised and socially excluded

• Shape the development of a public mental health response to communities dealing with the climate-nature crisis.

Climate, Environment and Mental Health Action Forum meetings

Below we detail a snapshot from each Forum meeting and the notes and resources which are available to download. If you require in an alternative format, please contact the team.

Meeting 3: 2nd October 2024

• Download Notes from the meeting. It was great to see lots of engagement from attendees on digital tools for climate and mental health – the meeting’s main topic. We shared Thrive LDN’s plans in this area and found people’s insights extremely helpful. We want to co-develop a new digital tool with partners, so get in touch if you are interested. To find out more, see pages 2-6 of the Notes document and the ‘Digital tools’ presentation slides.

We heard a fascinating presentation from Charles Ogunbode, Affiliate Member at Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). Charles covered emerging research into climate perceptions, emotions, and the implications for wellbeing among UK people of colour; and there was time for a quick Q&A. See pages 6-7 of the Notes and Charles’ presentation slides. Contact Charles to follow up on anything.

Finally, as always, we loved hearing from you about events and resources in the ‘Member’s Updates’ meeting slot (see page 8 of the Notes).

Meeting 2: 24th July 2024

• Download Notes from the meeting. It was great to see lots of enthusiasm at the meeting, and loads of ideas for collaborating around Climate, Environment, and Mental Health across London. We really enjoyed hearing Tracy Holtham – a gardener, interdisciplinary artist, and mental health advocate – talk about her work on nature, mental health, art, and the connections between all these – see pages 10-12 of the Notes document for more info.

The ‘Resources for Collaboration’ document shares the rich variety of ideas that came out of the meeting. The document covers: partner updates; a concise summary of projects for collaboration; and suggested collaborative clusters. Use people’s contact details (given in the document) to get in touch and find out more about initiatives. We loved hearing from the group about many events and brilliant resources – see at the ‘Updates from you’ section on pages 12-15 of the Notes document.

Meeting 1: 12th June 2024

• Download Notes and Resources from the meeting. 66 people attended our first Forum meeting, and there was so much positive energy. We introduced the Forum, started to get to know each other, took part in interactive activities to find out what people want from the Forum (‘collaboration’ was a top response, see pages 1-3), and heard from Zarina Ahmad at the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) about some of WEN’s amazing work (pages 3-5). We were also delighted to hear about many events taking place and brilliant resources in existence (pages 6-8).