Africalix Exclusive Interview
Jana, Founder of ClimateMind – Europe’s First Climate Psychology Agency
International climate negotiations are often portrayed as technical policy forums where rational actors debate emissions targets, financial mechanisms, and implementation frameworks.
Yet breakthrough moments in these spaces frequently owe more to emotional regulation, trust-building, and psychologically safe dialogue than to perfect policy design. Jana, founder of ClimateMind, Europe’s first dedicated climate psychology agency, has witnessed this dynamic firsthand.
As a psychologist working in the rooms where international climate policy is made, she has observed how stress, relationships, identity, and collective trauma shape outcomes in ways that traditional policy analysis cannot capture.
Her work focuses particularly on Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD), the dimensions of climate impact that cannot be measured in money but often matter most to people: culture, identity, language, spirituality, mental health, community cohesion, ancestral knowledge, and connection to land and sea.
In this exclusive interview with Africalix, Jana discusses why psychology is not peripheral but absolutely central to climate action, what happens when a Fijian fishing community must relocate and become farmers, and her vision for creating governance spaces where frontline communities directly shape the decisions that determine their futures.
From Abstract Crisis to Deeply Human Reality
Even during her psychology studies, Jana often found herself asking the same question: Why are we learning all these fascinating insights into human behavior, emotions, decision-making, trust, and resilience, yet barely applying them to the biggest societal crises of our time?
The real turning point came through conversations with a close friend from the Philippines who spoke not in abstract climate terms but about what the climate crisis was already doing to people’s daily lives, communities, and futures.
“Suddenly, climate change stopped being a distant environmental issue and became deeply human to me,” Jana recalls. “At that moment, a very concrete question emerged for me as a young psychologist: What can psychology contribute to helping societies, institutions, and leaders make better decisions in the face of this crisis?”
Because when examined closely, climate change is deeply psychological at every level. The causes are human. The political conflicts are human. The implementation barriers are human.
And the solutions ultimately depend on human cooperation, trust, courage, and collective action. That realization fundamentally shaped her path and later became the foundation of ClimateMind.
Building a Field That Barely Existed
Jana founded ClimateMind only one month after finishing her master’s degree in psychology. Looking back, she understands why many people thought it was a little crazy. At the time, the field was barely professional. People often described her decision as “brave,” but usually in a rather skeptical way.
“There was a widespread assumption that climate action belonged to engineering, economics, or policy—while psychology was seen as something secondary or soft,” she explains. “But to me, it felt impossible that psychology would remain on the sidelines while other disciplines were actively engaging with the defining crisis of our century.”
Almost everything about the climate crisis is connected to human behavior and human systems: decision-making, trust, fear, polarization, identity, implementation, cooperation, leadership, and resilience.
One of the biggest challenges in the early years was, therefore, not only building an organization but helping build awareness that these are psychological questions, too.
ClimateMind had to explain why climate policies fail despite knowledge, why implementation gaps emerge, why people resist change even when they understand the science, and why emotional and social dynamics shape political outcomes.
“What kept me going was the clear sense that this perspective was deeply needed—both by organizations trying to implement climate action, and by psychology itself as a discipline that has a responsibility to contribute to real-world crises,” Jana notes.
What Cannot Be Measured But Matters Most
When people hear “loss and damage,” they often think first about economic losses: destroyed homes, damaged roads, agricultural losses, or financial costs after climate disasters. Non-Economic Loss and Damage, or NELD, refers to everything that cannot easily be measured in money but often matters most to people: culture, identity, language, spirituality, mental health, community cohesion, ancestral knowledge, and connection to land and sea.
In Dominica, after Hurricane Maria, around 90% of homes were damaged or destroyed. Of course, there is an economic question about rebuilding houses and infrastructure. But there is also a profound human question: How do people emotionally cope with losing safety, stability, memories, and social structures?
How do communities process collective trauma? How do neighbors support one another before, during, and after such events?
Another example comes from Fiji, where some coastal villages are already being relocated because of sea-level rise. In one community, people spoke about losing access to coastal plants that held spiritual and medicinal importance. Others described what it means to move away from the sea and no longer identify as fisherfolk, but instead have to become farmers.
“These are not just economic shifts—they are changes to identity, culture, and ways of life developed over generations,” Jana explains. “And in places like Tuvalu, many people grow up constantly hearing narratives that their country may disappear beneath rising seas—along with their language, dances, cemeteries, and cultural heritage.
That is what NELD is about: the deeply human dimensions of climate change that are often invisible in statistics but central to people’s lives.”
The African Context: Layered Vulnerabilities
When asked about what makes the African context distinct from a psychological and NELD perspective, Jana responds with humility, noting that she has not yet had the opportunity to work directly on NELD projects within African countries themselves. Africa is incredibly diverse, and local experts and communities should always lead these conversations.
At the same time, there are important dynamics that seem particularly relevant across many African contexts: climate impacts often intersect with conflict, displacement, colonial histories, governance challenges, inequality, and rapid demographic change. This creates very layered forms of loss and vulnerability.
“From a psychological perspective, this means we cannot treat loss and damage only as a technical or economic issue,” Jana notes. “Climate impacts may also affect identity, belonging, intergenerational memory, cultural continuity, social cohesion, and trust in institutions.”
Another important point is that Africa is home to enormous cultural, spiritual, and linguistic diversity. That means there cannot be one standardized global method for understanding NELD.
Approaches developed in Europe or North America cannot simply be transferred to communities with very different histories, values, and knowledge systems.
To Jana, this means assessment processes should be deeply localized and co-developed with communities themselves. Approaches should combine scientific rigor with cultural sensitivity, local knowledge, and psychological understanding.
And most importantly, local psychologists, researchers, community leaders, faith leaders, and indigenous knowledge holders should play a central role in shaping how these conversations and assessments happen.
Psychological Safety as Guiding Vision
When Jana speaks about psychological safety in NELD assessment contexts, she sees it less as a perfect state and more as an important guiding vision.
To address loss and damage seriously, first, there is a need to understand what people are actually experiencing, economically, socially, culturally, emotionally, and spiritually. That means assessment and data collection are necessary.
But especially in the case of NELD, these assessments often touch extremely personal and existential dimensions of people’s lives. People may speak about grief, fear, displacement, identity loss, trauma, cultural erosion, or the loss of places that hold deep meaning for them. If these conversations are handled poorly, assessments themselves can unintentionally become another form of harm or emotional burden.
“That is why psychological safety matters,” Jana explains. “It means creating spaces where difficult conversations are held with care, dignity, cultural sensitivity, and as much trust as possible.
Importantly, this also means we should not simply apply standardized psychological tools developed in very different contexts directly onto frontline communities around the world. Psychology needs to be combined with culture, spirituality, religion, local values, and local realities.”
In her view, the strongest approaches are often community-led or locally embedded. Local psychologists, facilitators, community organizers, elders, or trusted community members are often far better positioned to conduct these conversations in culturally meaningful and trauma-sensitive ways than outside actors alone.
“Because ultimately, assessments should not only extract information,” Jana emphasizes. “Ideally, they should also strengthen trust, understanding, agency, and the ability of communities to shape solutions themselves.”
When Human Dynamics Unlock Breakthroughs
Many people imagine international negotiations as purely rational or technical spaces. But in reality, they are deeply human spaces shaped by stress, relationships, trust, emotions, fatigue, identity, and political pressure.
Jana remembers one negotiation process in which, shortly before the end, it suddenly seemed as if months of progress might collapse because one country was blocking consensus. Tension in the room was extremely high.
“What ultimately made the difference was not a new technical proposal on paper,” she recalls. “It was the ability of one highly skilled facilitator to navigate the human dynamics of the situation. He had built enough trust and personal connection with the relevant parties over time that he could bring a small group of key negotiators together privately for a direct conversation while everyone else waited anxiously outside.”
In that moment, one could see how much climate diplomacy depends on human capacities: emotional regulation under pressure, creativity in problem-solving, the ability to understand different perspectives, and the social trust needed to keep difficult conversations alive despite conflicting interests. Eventually, a compromise became possible.
“To me, this illustrates that climate negotiations are not only policy processes—they are also deeply relational processes,” Jana notes.
Closing the Gap: Structural Distance and Direct Participation
The core problem regarding the gap between frontline communities and high-level negotiators is actually very clear: at COPs and international negotiations, government positions dominate the process. But even within many countries, those positions are often still only partially shaped by the lived realities of the communities most affected by climate change.
Many consultation processes already exist, community dialogues, stakeholder participation, citizen engagement, and some are very meaningful. But an important question remains: To what extent do these perspectives truly influence political decision-making afterward?
In Jana’s view, one major challenge is therefore structural distance. Negotiators often operate in highly technical, time-pressured, diplomatic environments that are far removed from daily frontline realities.
“One important step would be to make direct participation by community-led organizations much easier,” she argues. “Many UNFCCC observer organizations today are large international NGOs from the Global North with significant resources. Meanwhile, smaller community-led organizations from highly affected regions often face enormous financial and logistical barriers to participating consistently.”
She believes there should be structural support for more direct access: funding travel, visas, translation, preparation, and long-term participation for community representatives themselves, because there is a big difference between hearing about a community and hearing directly from someone like a community leader in Fiji who personally led the relocation of his village and can explain what these processes mean emotionally, culturally, and socially.
Reimagining COP31 and Beyond
Jana believes far more spaces are needed where people from frontline communities themselves, youth, elders, indigenous leaders, local organizers, farmers, and fishers can directly participate in climate governance spaces, including COPs. But this participation must be structurally supported through funding, fellowships, travel support, and long-term inclusion.
A psychologically informed approach would not only invite communities symbolically but also create formats that make meaningful human connections possible across power differences.
“For example, I could imagine side events or pavilion formats connected directly to specific negotiation topics on loss and damage, where community representatives share lived experiences if they wish to do so—facilitated by moderators trained in power-sensitive and psychologically aware dialogue methods,” Jana explains.
Sometimes, when listening to technical negotiations on loss and damage, it can almost feel as though the discussions are no longer about people. Community-centered formats can help reconnect policy debates with lived human realities.
But importantly, this is not only about emotion or storytelling. It is also about governance quality. A better understanding of lived realities can improve trust, legitimacy, cooperation, and, ultimately, the effectiveness of decisions themselves.
African youth and civil society can play an incredibly important role here—not only as advocates but also as co-designers of new participation models, new narratives, and new forms of climate leadership rooted in community realities.
Listening Before Speaking
If Jana could speak directly to a young climate activist in Sudan, a community elder in coastal Mozambique, or a policymaker in Nairobi, her first impulse would actually be to listen.
“I would want to understand how the young climate activist is feeling, what pressures and hopes exist within the community in coastal Mozambique, or how a policymaker in Nairobi understands the realities of loss and damage in the lives of their own population,” she explains. “Because every context is different, and meaningful solutions cannot simply be imposed from outside. They need to be built together.”
At the same time, what feels very important to her is that the people most affected by climate change are not only victims of the crisis. They are also holders of knowledge, resilience, cultural wisdom, and solutions that the world urgently needs to learn from.
“Psychology, at its best, can help create better understanding between people, strengthen cooperation, and support more humane and effective decision-making,” Jana concludes. “And I believe the future of this field will depend on whether we are willing to take the human dimension of climate governance seriously—not as an optional add-on, but as a central part of building just and lasting solutions.”
As international climate negotiations continue producing frameworks, targets, and mechanisms, Jana’s work with ClimateMind represents an essential intervention: the insistence that policy effectiveness ultimately depends on human dynamics that technical analysis alone cannot address.
By focusing on Non-Economic Loss and Damage, she highlights dimensions of climate impact—identity transformation, cultural erosion, collective trauma, spiritual disconnection—that rarely appear in economic models or emissions accounting but fundamentally shape how communities experience and respond to environmental change.
\Whether her vision of psychologically informed, community-centered governance can shift institutional practices at venues like COP31 remains uncertain.
Still, the recognition that climate negotiations are deeply relational processes shaped by trust, emotional regulation, and power-sensitive dialogue offers necessary correctives to dominant assumptions about how international cooperation actually works.
For African communities navigating layered vulnerabilities where climate impacts intersect with conflict, colonial histories, and rapid demographic change, Jana’s emphasis on localized assessment processes co-developed with local psychologists, faith leaders, and knowledge holders represents an approach that respects complexity rather than imposing standardized frameworks designed for contexts very different from their own.
The future of climate psychology as a field depends not merely on demonstrating relevance but on ensuring that the discipline itself embodies the principles it advocates: humility about what can be known from outside, genuine partnership with affected communities, and the understanding that effective climate action requires treating human experience not as a peripheral concern but as a central reality.
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Jana is the founder of ClimateMind, Europe’s first dedicated climate psychology agency, which she established one month after completing her master’s degree in psychology.
Her work focuses on Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD)—the dimensions of climate impact that cannot be measured in money but often matter most: culture, identity, language, spirituality, mental health, community cohesion, ancestral knowledge, and connection to land and sea.
Through ClimateMind, she works at the intersection of psychology and international climate policy, supporting organizations implementing climate action and helping build awareness that climate challenges are fundamentally psychological questions involving decision-making, trust, fear, polarization, identity, implementation, cooperation, leadership, and resilience.
Her approach emphasizes psychologically safe assessment formats, community-led methodologies, and the integration of psychology with culture, spirituality, and local knowledge systems.
