On 10 November 2022, during Resilience Day at the United Nations’ COP27 Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, a new global network called COP2 announced and launched its collaboration with the Race to Resilience, a campaign by the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions, to strengthen and nurture human resilience in the face of growing impacts of climate.
To date, the focus of global climate adaptation has been on the resilience of physical infrastructure. However, in its recent Human Development Report, the United Nations Development Programme highlighted that, “Mental wellbeing is under assault” to a degree that threatens humanity’s ability to meet the “demands of shaping our future in a transforming world”.
Including people’s resilience in the Race to Resilience is now a critical next step. It acknowledges how much individuals and communities need to be able to endure in the face of enormous trauma, anxiety, and grief from growing damage and losses from climate change, while also being able to adapt, problem-solve, develop new mindsets, and lead and deliver urgent transformations on which a sustainable planet relies.
COP2 (Care Of People x Planet) is a rapidly growing network of 230+ organisations from around the world, bringing together activists, researchers, community leaders, and a wide array of mental health practitioners who focus on the intersection between human resilience and climate change. It also joins with those working on deeply intertwined issues, such as climate justice, social equity, sustainability, and the protection of indigenous rights and culture.
The ambition of COP2 is to integrate into climate initiatives and commitments awareness of individual and collective mental health as both a serious vulnerability and a critical capability in the fight against climate change.
So today COP2 joined with the Race to Resilience to include in its “Sharm-el-Sheikh Implementation Solutions” this cross-cutting ambition: to grow the capacity for psychological resilience of 4 billion people living in communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. During 2023, COP2 will create a Roadmap, drawing on extensive global best practice and its growing, participatory network of Regional Hubs, to show how this ambition can be met.
Chair of COP2 and Director, Billion Minds Project at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Gary Belkin, said at the launch: “We are seeing growing attention, innovation and urgency to put social and emotional resilience and agency into the mainstream of climate policy and action. COP2 came together to converge this into a global agenda. Today, at COP27, that agenda has been super-sized. Like everything else with climate change, we are playing urgent catch-up. It is indeed a race, and one we must win.”
Jennifer Uchendu, Founder of SustyVibes and member of COP2’s global leadership added, “With COP2, we have a structure that is really dynamic, contextually relevant and culturally sensitive…we can feed in dialogues and opinions from people from every part of the world that can support policy formation. COP2 is what we need now, these are the kind of conversations we need to be having, and this is how change happens.”