Firefighters, resilience professionals, and frontline climate workers are being asked to support communities through escalating disasters, often while experiencing those same disasters themselves. Led by climate adaptation leader Susi Moser, The Adaptive Mind Project is developing training to help them stay effective for the long haul.
Burnout, PTSD, moral injury, and climate grief are increasingly common among the people doing the hardest work of climate adaptation. Yet technical professionals receive little or no training in trauma-informed approaches, emotional regulation, or peer support. The Adaptive Mind Project addresses that gap directly by building the psychosocial and leadership capacities that make sustained climate work possible.
The CO2 Foundation is supporting tailored in-depth training for cohorts of approximately 20 participants. Warming Fires, developed in partnership with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, focuses on training a cohort of firefighter peer support facilitators through a three-day in-person program. The Warming Fires coalition also includes FUSEE, Hotshot Wellness, and Fire-up, and applications are already arriving from firefighters across the U.S. and Canada. Partners describe the project not just as a training but as movement building, with peer support emerging as the preferred and proven model for ongoing firefighter wellness.
Trainings cover emotional regulation, trauma awareness, self- and co-regulation practices, mental health first aid, and trauma-informed leadership and facilitation. A parallel evaluation framework will measure changes in participants’ resilience, leadership confidence, and capacity to sustain their work, establishing a foundation for longer-term program evaluation. As opportunities arise, shorter training modules will also be developed for broader use.
Climate resilience relies on the capacity of frontline workers to keep showing up — human infrastructure that is as important as any technical or policy solution, and far less funded. The Adaptive Mind Project is building something that the climate field needs and has largely gone without, and the Foundation is proud to be in its corner.
Image info: Night operations on the Pine Gulch Fire in Colorado, August 2020. Kyle Miller/Wyoming Hotshots/USFS. Climate Visuals.