'How Climate Change is Changing Us' with Clayton Aldern

The Evolving Leader

As the world gets hotter, how is it changing our brains? In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by neuroscientist and author Clayton Aldern to explore how environmental shifts (especially climate change) are quietly reshaping our minds, behaviours, and capacity for decision-making. Drawing from his acclaimed book The Weight of Nature, Clayton explains how heat, trauma, and ecological instability are influencing everything from memory and empathy to aggression and judgement.

This isn’t just a conversation about climate change, it’s about what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world. Jean, Scott, and Clayton dig into the science behind our evolving mental states and offer a compelling call to rethink our relationship with the environment, not just to save the planet, but to preserve our own mental wellbeing. This is a conversation every leader should hear.

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Chapters

1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Can you give us an introduction to your career and how you became focussed on your current work? (00:04:59)

3. You have written that ‘It is the job of our brain to model the world as it is, and the world is mutating’. Can you explain that for us? (00:08:12)

4. In your book you lead us through a considerable range of implications that climate change has and will have on us in terms of physical and psychological impact. Can you talk us through some of these? (00:12:19)

5. You’ve said that ‘we can’t air condition our way out of the problem’. Can you talk to us about that? (00:21:26)

6. We can adapt to 50% of the consequences of climate change. Let’s talk about the 50% that we can’t cope with. (00:27:04)

7. How our healthcare systems need to adapt to deal with this? (00:35:33)

8. You write ‘Our core lie is that people won’t actually feel the strain of a couple of extra degrees of warming; that the only thing acting on human behaviour is the behaviour of other humans’. How can start to re-write how we think about this? (00:44:43)

9. You talk about how sensing the world is the most important part of making sense of it, and in order to create this connection between ourselves and what’s happening you spend more time in nature. (00:51:32)

10. What are you doing next? (00:59:04)