When researchers want to understand how climate change affects mental health, the people most affected are often the least consulted. A new perspective article published in BMC Global and Public Health documents what happened when a global initiative called Connecting Climate Minds tried to reverse that pattern, placing people with lived experience of climate-related mental health challenges at the center of a worldwide research effort rather than treating them as subjects of it. The paper, written by members of the project team including lead author Britt Wray of Stanford University and senior collaborators across multiple regions, reflects candidly on both the successes and the missteps of that experiment, offering a rare inside account of how difficult genuine power-sharing in research can be.
Connecting Climate Minds set out with two goals: to build a collaborative, transdisciplinary global community of practice, and to develop prioritized research and action agendas at the intersection of climate change and mental health. From its inception, the project aimed to center the expertise of people with lived experience of climate-related mental health challenges, incorporating perspectives not traditionally valued or engaged in research. To do this, the organizers established a Lived Experience Working Group composed of leaders and advocates from community-based nonprofits, including the Climate Mental Health Network, Force of Nature, and Sustyvibes, alongside researchers who themselves have lived experience. This group was given the task of guiding the integration of lived experience into every component of the project, from co-designing research agendas to producing multimedia storytelling outputs.
The scale of the effort was considerable. Communities of Practice were established in seven UN Sustainable Development Goal regions, each coordinated by a Regional Community Convenor and each including a Lived Experience Advisory Group and Youth Ambassadors as core members of the regional teams. Each convenor hosted two multi-stakeholder dialogues that brought together lived experience experts, transdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and civil society members. The dialogues produced regional research and action agendas, which were then synthesized into a global agenda highlighting research priorities for understanding and addressing the mental health burdens of the climate crisis. In total, the project directly engaged more than 1,180 participants from 126 countries. In March 2024, a global event was held in Barbados to celebrate the outcomes and finalize the global research and action agenda.
Beyond the regional structure, the project hosted thematic in-person and online dialogues with three communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change yet chronically underrepresented in climate and health policy decisions: Indigenous communities, smallholder farmers and fisher peoples, and young people. The organizers recruited paid advisors, community leaders, and organizations from these communities to co-produce dedicated workstreams, guided by the principle of “nothing about us without us.” The project also conducted a story-gathering process in which personal narratives of lived experience were recorded for media outreach. These first-person videos were later shown at the UN climate negotiations known as COP28 in Dubai, including on the World Health Organization stage, giving lived experience experts a direct channel to a global, policy-oriented audience.
The lessons documented in the paper emerged from two post-project online workshops in which team members engaged in structured critical reflection. Each workshop lasted 90 minutes and combined geographic regions to allow synchronous discussion across time zones; one covered Europe and North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, while the other covered the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Southern Asia, Oceania, and Eastern and South Eastern Asia. Participants captured their insights on digital whiteboards organized into categories covering lessons for researchers, funders, policymakers, and practitioners, along with reflections on successes, opportunities for improvement, and sustainability. The facilitators then grouped similar ideas, removed duplicates, and circulated a synthesis to all participants for feedback and refinement.
Several core principles emerged from this process. The first was the importance of what the authors call “moving at the speed of trust” — appropriately resourcing relationship building rather than rushing to outputs. Relational care, the authors argue, means valuing the individuals involved in the research process as much as the research outputs, even under tight deadlines. A second principle was reciprocity: communities should not be viewed merely as sources of data but as active partners, and research should consider whether there are direct benefits to the individuals and communities involved. The authors note a recurring frustration among contributors who shared their experiences with researchers only to find that nothing changed with respect to the challenges their communities face, a dynamic that breeds distrust and burnout.
The paper is also blunt about the risks researchers pose to the very people they seek to learn from. Historical harms documented across many fields include extracting lived experience as data to generate academic capital without consent or reciprocity, operating only within Western institutional frameworks that devalue local knowledges, pathologizing normal community experiences, misrepresenting insider knowledge, retraumatizing previously harmed individuals through insensitive questioning, and raising expectations for long-term support that are never met. To counter these risks, the authors recommend that anyone gathering first-person narratives receive training in Psychological First Aid or a similar trauma-informed approach, and that interviews never be exploitative in intent. They also warn against tokenism: story gatherers tend to gravitate toward charismatic, easily accessible narrators, and should instead deliberately seek out voices that are harder to reach to avoid perpetuating inequities by continually re-engaging a small handful of experts.
Cultural and contextual sensitivity ran through every layer of the project’s practice. The team used a subgranting model that provided funding, resources, and infrastructure for local integration, including work by an Indigenous Advisory Board with the Waman Wasi community leadership to engage Indigenous community members in the Peruvian Amazon. Translators were available during regional dialogues, participant information sheets were produced in multiple languages, and feedback mechanisms allowed lived experience advisors to consent to and amend their contributions at any time. On questions of data ownership, the authors argue that standard university research ethics protocols may not suffice, and that these issues must be discussed explicitly and early with participants, particularly in accordance with Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks. In one notable institutional first, the project seeded equitable processes at its host university, Imperial College London, that the institution had not used before, including collective consent and the use of fingerprints in decolonial research ethics practice — changes that demanded patience, openness, humility, and goodwill from everyone involved.
The perspective also identifies systemic barriers that individual good intentions cannot overcome. Rigid funding structures were a persistent obstacle: the authors argue that a small lived experience budget should be a red flag, and that healthy, flexible budget requests should be welcomed as a sign of commitment rather than questioned, since co-produced work cannot always predict exact timelines or costs at the outset. CCM’s own funder, the Wellcome Trust, maintained a full-time internal team dedicated to lived experience work, which the authors describe as a tremendous benefit, yet they caution that even well-resourced funders must hold their concepts lightly and make time for context and nuance. Despite securing honorariums for contributors, the project would have benefited from a multi-year funding pathway, and capacity-building efforts remained limited to basic content rather than the deeper training that would allow community leaders to engage effectively with researchers and vice versa.
The downstream effects of the project offer some evidence that the approach can ripple outward. Policy changes have been observed, including work with members of the Jordanian government to integrate climate change into mental health policies and mental health into climate change policies. CCM results have been presented at successive UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences, and the project served as a mental health partner in developing the Belém Health Action Plan, a global framework launched at COP30 in Brazil to place health and equity at the center of climate action. The UK Health Security Agency positioned its report on climate change and mental health against the CCM agenda, and the project’s outputs contributed to advocacy that resulted in the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Climate Change and Mental Health, whose commissioners include people with lived experience of the mental health impacts of climate change from around the world. In Nigeria, community workshops using CCM resources combined Indigenous and scientific knowledge to address climate-related distress and demonstrated practical water filtration solutions in response to water insecurity compounding mental health burdens. The authors are careful to frame these as documented outcomes of a single reflective exercise rather than proof of a general model, and they acknowledge that their own positionality — spanning Global South and Global North institutions, Indigenous and settler identities, and varying degrees of lived experience — shaped both the project’s strengths and its limitations. Their closing message is that without genuine partnerships with those who have firsthand experience of climate-related mental health challenges, the most relevant opportunities for change and localized solutions might be entirely missed.
Subject of Research: Lived experience engagement methods in global climate change and mental health research
Article Title: Best practices for engaging lived experience experts in dialogues about climate change and mental health: lessons learned from a global effort
Article References: Wray, B., Vercammen, A., Zeitz, L., Wright, S., Burrows, V.-E., Yamazaki, J., Ali, S. J., Hill, K., Tiatia-Siau, J., Wangmo, K., Aruta, J. J. B., Co, G., Guinto, R. R., & Lawrance, E. L. (2026). Best practices for engaging lived experience experts in dialogues about climate change and mental health: lessons learned from a global effort. BMC Global and Public Health, 4(1), Article 100. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44263-026-00321-7
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s44263-026-00321-7
Keywords: climate change, mental health, lived experience, community-engaged research, Connecting Climate Minds, Indigenous communities, ethical storytelling, research ethics, global health, participatory research, funding structures, youth engagement
News Source: Glenn Wilkins. (October 28, 2026). Lessons from a global effort to center lived experience in climate and mental health research. Scienmag.
