Environmental psychology studies the interplay between individuals and the built and natural environment (Steg et al., 2019).
Environmental psychology is one of the key disciplines in the scientific work in ACAF. Especially in planning the survey that will look into Arctic youth views on climate change, psychological theories are used.
ACAF was presented in the International Conference on Environmental Psychology (ICEP 2023), that was held in Aarhus, Denmark. ICEP is organized every two years and is the place to be if you want to keep up with the latest research in this domain.
More about the conference here.
Besides the Arctic conferences within the Arctic research community, it is also important to spread the information concerning the Arctic to audiences that normally are not working with Arctic issues. Sometimes our tight Arctic community forgets that not everyone knows about the issues self-evident to us who do work with Arctic issues.
The presentation held by me, (Jaana Sorvali) was well received and attracted a lot of discussion and new ideas for collaboration. The main point was to remind the audience mostly filled with psychologists, that Arctic is a unique region with as unique problems that require collaborative solving with the Arctic communities. I know that it’s difficult to understand to us with an Arctic flame in our hearts, but not even all the residents of Arctic nations think about all things related to Arctic all the time!
You can access the presentation here.
This post and the pictures are by Jaana Sorvali (PhD), the coordinator of the ACAF project and research scientist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke).
Steg, L., van den Berg, A. & de Groot, J. 2019. Environmental psychology: History, scope, and methods. In: Steg, L., & de Groot, J. (eds.). Environmental psychology. An introduction. (2nd ed., pp. 1–11) WILEY.