The psychological effects of the climate crisis
Updated: Sep 27, 2022
King Salman International University | Egypt
Team members: Ziad Mohammed Asaad Ahmed, Raghad Khaled Ragab Abd Almonem, Ezzeldin Mohamed Mohamed Mohdali, Abdelrahman Abdelaziz Abdallah Mohamed, Mohamed Elsayed Mohamed Marey, Haneen Ali Khabir Abdelsalam, and Reham Hany Abdulrazek Elsaied.
Hello, world! As we know, the Earth is what unites us andbrings us together today. So we at King Salman international university come together in college where we unite.
Our names and roles are Raghad: data collecting, Reham: social media, Haneen: review of scientific literature, Ziad: data collecting, EzzEldin: Graphic and data presenting), Abdelrahman: communication with administration, and Mohammed: international communication. Even though we are all studying in one of the most arduous academic faculties, we participated in this project believing that we can spread awareness and change the minds of the Egyptians about this dangerous crisis that is slowly killing our mental health, which affects almost our daily life!
Report 1: June 2022
Last month we interviewed a series of psychiatrists and mental health specialists. These included Dr. Garret Barnwell, a clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner who is a University Research Committee Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. He is a South African psychiatrist interested in the impact of climate change on mental health. We discussed ideas that have influenced and can affect mental health. On the other hand, we held a meeting with a psychiatrist at Mansoura University, Egypt: Dr. Abdullah Mohammed. We discussed the recent events in Egypt and the world that affected people quickly and affected themselves with what they went through.
We look forward to doing a survey and a questionnaire for people, especially college students in Egypt and the Middle East. We intend to conduct it to measure the extent to which they are affected by rising temperatures and the extent of the impact the scarcity of water affects their psychological state by, naturally, increasing stress, anxiety, and trauma in their lives.
Report 2: July 2022
In the past month, we couldn’t achieve what we planned as we were restrained with our end-of-semester exams but still, we were able to keep track, and we accomplished the following:
We started doing a climate anxiety global survey by questioning undergraduates in countries affected by climate change
We added our surveys questionnaire on Google Forms to facilitate for university students to fill and send the forms
We started contacting students studying abroad in countries severely affected by climate change to fill out the forms
Attended the EAUC global event
Tasks that will be achieved
Start of data collection of climate anxiety among undergraduates using validated questionnaire published in The Lancet
Spreading awareness through social media sites
Report 4: September 2022
We distributed and shared our questionnaire to universities inside Egypt and abroad and also at the level of the faculties of our university.
The data collection took a while, and we were able to reach half the number we were targeting.
We faced challenges in collecting the data. We had a weak response when it comes to filling out the online survey, so we decided to print the questionnaire and distribute it to students in the summer course parallel to the online survey.
Met our mentor (Dr. Beth Mark) and shared our project concept, future conceptions, and the challenges we faced and requested her counsel when it comes to distributing the forum
Created our Instagram page and started spreading awareness on the effects of climate change on the world and its effects precisely on mental health and how to cope with those effects
Tasks that will be achieved
Finishing data collection and starting data analysis
Hopefully, our next move will be making several workshops next month on
campus, workshops about the effects of climate change mentally
Contacting different psychologists to give a brief statement about our research
Designing a PowerPoint to sum up our project