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Citation

Engstrom S & Krings A (2025) A Framework for Trauma-Informed Climate Research: Interrupting the Relationship Between Climate Trauma and Social Inertia. Ecopsychology. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2024.0065

Abstract
We are experiencing a climate crisis on a global scale. The impacts associated with this crisis bring havoc to all populations, though disproportionately to those already vulnerable due to social inequalities associated with historical and contemporary collective cultural trauma. Understanding the emotional, social, and physical impacts of climate change, and the deleterious effects they have on individuals’ and communities’ ability to cope, prevent, resist, respond, adapt and mitigate climate-fueled disasters, is a first step toward dismantling entrenched social inertia. To this end, in this article, we begin by theorizing that there is a mutually-reinforcing relationship that connects climate havoc, climate trauma and social inertia. Building upon this understanding, we introduce an innovative trauma-informed research framework as a tool for community-based researchers, citizen scientists, and other social change agents to assess and motivate individual and collective readiness for social action relating to climate and environmental health. The framework centers the expertise of those most impacted by climate havoc, including people with lived experience of collective cultural trauma. In this way, a trauma-informed research framework can support people, organizations, and communities as they craft proactive policies and practice models that prevent or mitigate harm–including dissociation and social inertia-currently associated with the climate crisis.