AiCC works with partners, Thrive LDN and University of Nottingham, to tackle climate and mental health injustice.

Thrive LDN (launched in July 2017 by the Mayor of London and London Health Board partners) is a pan-London public mental health partnership that was set up to ensure all Londoners – especially marginalised, excluded, and vulnerable groups – can take meaningful climate action in their communities whilst also improving their mental health and wellbeing. Endorsed and supported by a wide range of stakeholders and partners, who make up some of the membership, it aims to foreground voices of community representatives, those with lived experiences of poor mental health, and those most deprived socio-economically. It also connects individuals and communities with multi-sector organisations to enable more effective, co-produced, and joined-up action on climate, nature, and mental health. Thrive LDN is part of Transformation Partners in Health and Care’s (TPHC) ‘partnerships’ portfolio, which has been hosted by The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust since July 2022.

On 11th December 2024, our CEO, Abiola Okubanjo, was interviewed for Thrive LDN’s ‘In Conversation with’ slot in a Forum meeting. Abiola spoke about how AiCC’s work – recruiting, empowering and mobilising individuals and organisations from Black, Asian, Mixed Heritage and other ethnic minority communities to get involved in activities that address health, social, economic, political, justice and education inequities and inequalities – provides the perfect opportunity for tackling climate injustice.

In addition to experiencing ethnic or racial inequity, discrimination or inequality, the communities AiCC works with also suffer from climate injustice.  However, these groups are largely non-climate-identifying.  They generally do not participate in related research or engage with climate action –  simply feeling that it has nothing to do with them, their lives or immediate priorities.

To combat the “uneven and often unjust distribution of attention and prestige in the environmental sector” that often bypasses people of colour-led community groups, process-ownership for research must be shared or delegated to organisations that have real insight around the experiences and lived wisdom of people of colour on climate change. 

A 2023 report – Spotlight – How people of colour experience and engage with climate change in Britain; Ogunbode, C. A., Anim, N., Kidwell, J., Sawas, A., Solanki, S. – provides more evidence and gives more nuance to the matter. The report decisively showed that people of colour in the UK are concerned about Climate Change and are willing to take action to engage with it as a personal and public issue. Yet, for a variety of reasons, their participation, concerns, and lived experience is not normally taken into account in the design and delivery of climate change policy solutions at community and National levels.  Excluded and/or disengaged from climate change issues, their voices are unheard and their opinions are neglected in wider climate change discourse.

AiCC has been working with one of the co-authors of the Spotlight report, Charles Ogunbode (Assistant Professor in Applied Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham), to deliver community engagement activities within the Climate and Mental Health Research space.

Together, they are exploring ways to better understand how people of colour understand, talk about and experience climate change and what the impact on their mental health could be.  Their approach is to start from the pain-points that are caused by climate change (i.e. how people’s lives are negatively impacted) but that people may not necessarily associate with this topic (E.g. asthma, heat stroke, depression).  Having established the proximity of climate change to the target population’s concerns, lived experiences and, specifically, their health challenges, they hope to creatively engage them in compelling climate activities.  

AiCC and University of Nottingham’s innovative approach of ‘reverse engineering’ compelling climate stories and engagement should advance knowledge on climate action for vulnerable communities and those that are not climate-identifying.