Mindful Climate Action (MCA)
Mindful Climate Action (MCA) is an educational and behavior change program. Our interdisciplinary team of physicians, scientists, and environmental advocates designed the Mindful Eco-Wellness: Steps to Healthier Living program to help people decrease their carbon footprints while enhancing their personal health and happiness.
Publications
MCA has published eight peer-reviewed papers, including a description of the health threats that climate change poses, a description of our mindfulness-based approach toward improving personal health while lowering carbon footprint, the development of a dietary intake environmental impact calculator, and the results of our first feasibility/demonstration project.
Our director, Bruce Barrett, wrote a paper on the benefits of transitioning toward plant-based diets and led another reviewing the state of the science and providing an update on our experience with Mindful Eco-Wellness in Wisconsin. We also published a paper explaining the behavioral eco-wellness conceptual framework.
- Climate Change, Human Health, and Epidemiological Transition
- An Environmental Impact Calculator for 24-h Diet Recalls
- Mindful Climate Action: Health and Environmental Co-Benefits from Mindfulness-Based Behavioral Training
- Mindfulness and Climate Change Action: A Feasibility Study
- Imagining Eco-Wellness: A Scoping Review of Interventions Aimed at Changing Individual Behaviors to Promote Personal Health and Environmental Sustainability
- Health and Sustainability Co-benefits of Eating Behaviors: Towards a Science of Dietary Eco-Wellness
- Mindful Eco-Wellness: Steps Toward Personal and Planetary Health
- Behavioral Eco-Wellness
- Behavioral Eco-Wellness: Definition, Conceptual Framework, and Research Agenda
Contact Us
Mindful Climate Action Eight-Week Program
Mindful Eco-Wellness group trainings aim to improve health and happiness while reducing carbon footprint. The Mindful Climate Action program will help people drive less, walk and bicycle more, reduce household energy use and overconsumption, and eat less meat and more plant-based foods.
Groups meet weekly for 2- to 2.5-hour sessions for eight weeks. Daily mindfulness practice focused on concepts, experiences, and behavioral choices relevant to carbon footprint and climate change complements the group sessions.
This behavioral training wellness program combines mindfulness-based meditation practice with college-level education on climate change, energy use, and carbon footprint. Growing mindfulness research has indicated that mindfulness interventions have great potential to effect behavior change.
Eco-Wellness Resources
View talks by UW scientists who came to the pilot class:
- A Grateful Day
- Algonquin Water Song
- Awareness, Care, and Sustainability for Our Earth
- Awe Outing
- Climate 101 with Bill Nye
- Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops
- Eating Healthy for the Planet
- Granddaughter’s Eyes by Nimo Patel
- Grateful by Nimo Patel
- Health Benefits of Nature
- MCA Presentation to 2020 NAPCRG Virtual Congress
- Mindfulness for Climate Action
- Planetary Health
- Test Your Climate Change IQ
- The Science of Mindfulness
- Water Meditation