Mapping the Climate and Ecological Emergency 8.00-10.00 am 30th November

Dear CAT colleagues 

We had a well-attended meeting on 20th October 2021 to see if there was enthusiasm in the global CAT community for setting up a Special Interest Group through ICATA and ACAT and other national CAT associations.  Thirty five people attended from across the globe, with representatives from the UK, Spain, Finland, Australia and New Zealand. We had rich and stimulating dialogues, talking in small groups, as well as sharing our thoughts and feelings in plenary discussions, and hearing presentations about people’s various experiences of relating to the CEE.   Key themes were active hope, working with our varieties of feelings, and wondering about how we could use CAT as a relational model to help formulate the problems of binary and polarised thinking, climate doom and shaming processes as well as denial, despair and paralysis.

For our next meeting we would like to build on the work of this first meeting to develop a shape and form for the SIG, and warmly invite you to join us, whether you attended the first meeting or not.  Is the focus of a SIG to be activism in partnership with other groups, activity through the use of CAT to help formulate distress, denial and other relationships to the CEE? Should we be thinking about intergroup dynamics, or be involved in our professional roles to add climate awareness to our formulations and work for mental health? We also plan to consider the practicalities of how we structure ourselves as a group, how often we meet, what events we might put on, and generally how we can use CAT to address the CEE.

Here is an outline of the meeting:

· Introduction: recap from last time and plan for today

· 1st small groups: writing and/or mapping on post COP26 and the future.

· Plenary/feedback

· Possible presentations about how we could engage with the CEE.

· 2nd small groups: what would we like a CAT SIG to do? What could its remit and practice be? What should it be called?

· Plenary/feedback

· Invitation to a coordinating group (to take the ideas from the 2nd small group, firm up a plan for how the SIG runs, write up a remit, structure etc).

· Date for next meeting