Africalix Exclusive Interview
Janna Hoppmann, Founder and CEO of ClimateMind – Europe’s first organization dedicated to applying psychology to climate and biodiversity transformation.
International climate negotiations are often described as technical forums where rational actors debate emissions targets, finance mechanisms, and implementation rules.
Yet in practice, many breakthrough moments depend far more on emotional regulation, trust-building, and psychologically safe dialogue than on perfectly designed policy text.
As a psychologist working inside these processes, Janna Hoppmann has witnessed how human dynamics can unlock—or block—progress in ways that traditional policy analysis struggles to explain.
Janna is the founder of ClimateMind, Europe’s first organization focused on applying psychology to climate and biodiversity transformation.
Through research, advisory work, capacity building, and international partnerships, ClimateMind supports governments, international organizations, COP Presidencies, businesses, and civil society in strengthening the psychological infrastructure needed for effective climate governance, cooperation, and implementation.
Drawing on work that spans frontline communities in the Pacific and Caribbean to international climate negotiations, ClimateMind examines how trust, participation, collective agency, and institutional learning shape whether climate action actually succeeds on the ground.
Her work pays particular attention to Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD)—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, Janna explains why psychology is not a peripheral “soft” add-on but central to climate governance, what happens when a Fijian fishing community must relocate inland and redefine its way of life, and her vision for 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, Janna found herself asking a simple but unsettling question: why are we learning so much about human behaviour, emotions, decision-making, trust, and resilience—yet applying almost none of this knowledge to the defining crises of our time?
The turning point came through conversations with a close friend from the Philippines, who spoke not in abstract climate terms but about what the 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,” Janna 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?”
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. This realization fundamentally shaped Janna’s path and later became the foundation of ClimateMind.
Today, ClimateMind describes these enabling conditions as Psychological Infrastructure: the psychological, relational, and institutional conditions that determine whether climate and biodiversity transformation can be implemented, coordinated, and sustained over time.
Rather than focusing primarily on individual behaviour change, the concept looks at the human dynamics that shape cooperation, trust, decision-making, implementation, and resilience across entire systems.
Building a Field That Barely Existed
Janna founded ClimateMind just one month after completing her master’s degree in psychology. Looking back, she understands why many people thought the step was “brave” in a slightly sceptical way: at the time, climate psychology was barely recognised as a professional field.
“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 every dimension of the climate crisis is connected to human behaviour and human systems: decision-making, trust, fear, polarization, identity, implementation, cooperation, leadership, and resilience.
One of the biggest early challenges was therefore not just building an organization, but helping establish climate psychology as a practical field within climate and biodiversity action itself.
ClimateMind has worked to translate psychological research into concrete applications for organizations, governments, international institutions, and communities—demonstrating how psychology can strengthen climate governance, implementation, participation, and long-term transformation capacity.
Today, the organization works across multiple levels, from community resilience and organizational transformation to international climate diplomacy, helping bridge the gap between psychological science and real-world implementation.
“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,” Janna notes.
From Communities to Climate Governance
While ClimateMind’s early work focused on climate psychology within organizations, civil society, and public engagement, it has increasingly expanded into international climate governance. Today, the organization works across three interconnected levels:
International climate governance: supporting the UNFCCC Secretariat, COP Presidencies, and international partners in strengthening trust, cooperation, participation, and negotiation processes, as well as the psychological design of implementation mechanisms such as Action Agendas and Roadmaps.
National and regional implementation: advising governments, climate funds, development organizations, and think tanks on integrating psychological perspectives into mitigation, adaptation, Loss and Damage, and climate finance, including frameworks to understand and address NELD.
Community resilience and transformation: co-developing programmes with frontline communities and regional partners to strengthen mental health, collective agency, resilience, and locally led adaptation, including NELD assessments and psychosocial support.
This multi-level approach reflects a core insight: climate policies often fail not because the science is unclear, but because human and institutional dynamics are not properly understood or supported.
What Cannot Be Measured But Matters Most
When people hear “loss and damage,” they often think first of economic losses: destroyed homes, damaged roads, agricultural losses, or financial costs after climate disasters.
Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD) refers to everything that cannot easily be measured in money but often matters most: 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. Beyond the economic question of rebuilding houses and infrastructure lies 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 neighbours 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 become farmers.
“These are not just economic shifts—they are changes to identity, culture, and ways of life developed over generations,” Janna 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
Asked what makes the African context distinct from a psychological and NELD perspective, Janna 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 must lead these conversations.
At the same time, some dynamics 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,” Janna notes. “Climate impacts may also affect identity, belonging, intergenerational memory, cultural continuity, social cohesion, and trust in institutions.”
Africa is home to enormous cultural, spiritual, and linguistic diversity. There cannot be a single 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 Janna, this means assessment processes should be deeply localized and co-developed with communities themselves. Approaches should combine scientific rigour with cultural sensitivity, local knowledge, and psychological understanding.
Crucially, 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 Janna speaks about psychological safety in NELD assessment contexts, she understands it less as a perfect state and more as a guiding vision. To address loss and damage seriously, there is first a need to understand what people are actually experiencing—economically, socially, culturally, emotionally, and spiritually. That makes assessment and data collection necessary.
But in NELD contexts, these assessments often touch extremely personal and existential dimensions of people’s lives. People may speak about grief, fear, displacement, identity loss, traumatic experiences, cultural erosion, or the loss of places that hold deep meaning.
If these conversations are handled poorly, assessments themselves can unintentionally become another form of harm or emotional burden.
“That is why psychological safety matters,” Janna 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 better positioned than external actors to conduct these conversations in culturally meaningful and trauma-sensitive ways.
“Ultimately, assessments should not only extract information,” Janna emphasizes. “Ideally, they should also strengthen trust, understanding, agency, and the ability of communities to shape solutions themselves.”
Beyond assessment, ClimateMind works with governments, regional organizations, and international partners to integrate psychological dimensions into adaptation planning, relocation processes, Loss and Damage policies, and community resilience strategies.
The goal is not only to understand loss, but to strengthen the human capacities required to navigate transformation in dignified and locally meaningful ways.
When Human Dynamics Unlock Breakthroughs
Many people imagine international negotiations as purely rational or technical spaces. In reality, they are deeply human spaces shaped by stress, relationships, trust, emotions, fatigue, identity, and political pressure.
Janna recalls one negotiation where, shortly before the end, months of progress seemed at risk 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, it became visible 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,” Janna notes.
These observations increasingly shape ClimateMind’s work on international climate governance. In dialogue with COP Presidencies, the UNFCCC Secretariat, governments, and climate policy organizations, the organization explores how psychological perspectives can strengthen negotiation processes, implementation platforms, and institutional learning.
Current areas of interest include trust-building across negotiation cycles, psychologically informed Action Agendas and Roadmaps, implementation support, coalition-building, and meaningful stakeholder participation.
Closing the Gap: Structural Distance and Direct Participation
The core problem regarding the gap between frontline communities and high-level negotiators is, in Janna’s view, structurally clear. At COPs and international negotiations, government positions dominate the process—and even these positions are often only partially shaped by the lived realities of those most affected by climate change.
Many consultation processes already exist—community dialogues, stakeholder engagement, citizen participation—and some are meaningful. But a key question remains: to what extent do these perspectives truly influence political decision-making afterward?
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,” Janna 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.
There is a big difference between hearing about a community and hearing directly from a leader who personally guided the relocation of a village and can explain what these processes mean emotionally, culturally, and socially.
ClimateMind therefore increasingly explores how international climate governance can move beyond consultation toward genuine co-creation. The aim is to enable frontline communities not only to share experiences but to actively shape climate governance, implementation processes, and institutional learning.
Reimagining COP31 and Beyond
Looking toward COP31 and future negotiation cycles, Janna believes far more spaces are needed where people from frontline communities, youth, elders, Indigenous leaders, local organizers, farmers, and fishers can directly participate in climate governance spaces.
But this participation must be structurally supported through funding, fellowships, travel support, and long-term inclusion—not just symbolic invitations.
A psychologically informed approach would not only invite communities into rooms designed elsewhere; it would 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,” Janna 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-centred formats can help reconnect policy debates with lived human realities.
Crucially, this is not only about emotion or storytelling; it is about governance quality. A better understanding of lived realities can improve trust, legitimacy, cooperation, and ultimately the effectiveness of decisions.
African youth and civil society can play a particularly important role here—not only as advocates but as co-designers of new participation models, narratives, and forms of climate leadership rooted in community realities.
In parallel, ClimateMind has begun exploring how psychological principles can be embedded more systematically into the design of international climate governance—for example through psychologically informed stakeholder processes, implementation platforms, Action Agenda initiatives, institutional learning systems, and future COP processes.
Listening Before Speaking
If Janna 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 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, she stresses that people most affected by climate change are not only victims. They are 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,” Janna 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.”
Climate Psychology as Enabling Infrastructure
As international climate negotiations continue to produce frameworks, targets, and mechanisms, Janna’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.
For African communities navigating layered vulnerabilities where climate impacts intersect with conflict, colonial histories, and rapid demographic change, Janna’s emphasis on localized assessment processes co-developed with local psychologists, faith leaders, and knowledge holders offers an approach that respects complexity rather than imposing standardized frameworks designed for very different contexts.
Beyond individual behaviour and communication, ClimateMind argues that psychology should be understood as part of the enabling infrastructure of climate governance itself—alongside science, finance, technology, and institutions.
Just as climate finance provides financial capacity and governance provides institutional structures, psychological infrastructure creates the human conditions under which cooperation, implementation, and long-term transformation become possible.
The future of climate psychology as a field will depend not only on demonstrating its 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 a commitment to treating human experience not as a peripheral concern but as a central reality in climate governance.
ClimateMind is Europe’s first organization dedicated to applying psychology to climate and biodiversity transformation.
The organization works at the intersection of psychology, international climate governance, public policy, and implementation, supporting governments, international organizations, businesses, and civil society in strengthening the psychological infrastructure of transformation.
Its work spans climate negotiations, adaptation, Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD), leadership, participation, trust, implementation, and international cooperation.
