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This article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. The knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. Practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. To illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. This initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. Towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. This project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. In this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the project’s outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. The contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth. Keywords: global climate change, environment, youth, education, community psychology Over its years of existence, community psychology has taken on increasingly diverse social issues for research and intervention. As the world advances in complexity and new problems emerge, it is important that our discipline continues to be responsive to the needs of humanity through our selection of priorities for research and intervention. Global climate change and the need for a shift toward a culture of environmental sustainability have been identified by several authors as prospective priority areas for community psychology (e.g., Culley & Angelique, 2010; Riemer, 2010; Riemer & Reich, 2011; Quimby & Angelique, 2011). Community psychology has the potential to play an important leadership role in developing mitigation strategies that are based on ecological and systems thinking and appropriately reflect the complexity of the environmental situation that the world faces today. In reflecting on existing efforts to address these environmental issues, we are reminded of Einstein’s often quoted insight that the problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. Many psychology-informed behavior change strategies, for example, seem to accept financial and social status elements as essential to motivating individuals to make environmental choices, rather than challenging individuals in order to seek more complex methods of change that target other forms of motivation more likely to make significant impact (World Wildlife Fund [WWF], 2008). We agree with other authors (e.g., Clover, 2002; Harré, 2011; Riemer, 2010; WWF, 2008) that an alternative approach is needed, one that reflects a more complex method of individual and social transformation. In this paper, we present an example of how community psychology theory and principles can be used to create an environmental change program that reflects complex systems thinking through the mode of education. Mainstream psychology has focused much of its research regarding sustainability on the internal drivers of consumption behavior (Uzzell & Räthel, 2009). Axelrod and Lehman (1993), for example, identify three key factors associated with environmental behaviors: attitudes (“I believe, therefore I act”), sense of efficacy (“I can, therefore I act”), and motivation (“I desire, therefore I act”). These types of frameworks locate impetus for environmental change within individuals. From this orientation, methods are developed that apply marketing techniques, such as market segmentation and financial incentives, to motivate individuals to make small and painless life changes that are in line with society’s vision of green consumption (WWF, 2008). Global	  Journal	  of	  Community	  Psychology	  Practice Volume	  4,	  Issue	  1 March	  2013

Fostering Critical Thinking about Climate Change: Applying Community Psychology to an Environmental Education Project with Youth