Bob Doppelt founded and coordinates the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC), a network of mental health, social service, disaster management, climate, and faith organizations and professionals (website: http://itrcoalitionorg). He is trained in both counseling psychology and environmental science and has combined the two fields throughout his career. He is also a Graduate of the International Program on the Management of Sustainability, in Ziest, The Netherlands, a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Instructor, a meditation instructor at Spirit Rock in California, and a former Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.
Early in his career Bob worked as a counseling psychologist with troubled youth and their families. Decades later he directed the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon, a climate change research and technical assistance program that was one of the first in the U.S. to assist private and public entities to develop climate mitigation and adaptation plans. For many years he also taught systems thinking and climate change policy at the university. Through this work Bob realized that the mental health and psycho-social-spiritual impacts of the climate crisis were a significant but largely unaddressed problem. This led him in 2013 to organize the ITRC.
In 2024, the ITRC’s work helping communities worldwide organize Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks (TRCNs) to prevent and heal climate-generated traumas led it to become the 35th partner of the UN High Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Campaign.
Due to his many years of work, in 2015 Bob was named one the world’s “50 Most Talented Social Innovators” by the World CRS Congress.
For over a decade Bob wrote a monthly column on climate change and psychosocial issues for the Register Guard, his hometown paper. Bob has also written for Psychology Today and currently writes a monthly column on Substack.
He is the author of a number of books on the interface between individual and community mental health, social change, and ecological regeneration.
His most recent book is Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas: A Guide for Building Resilience and Hope in Communities (Taylor and Francis/Routledge Publishing, 2023). It describes the outcomes of an intensive two+ year research project that determined that a public health approach to mental health is necessary to prevent and heal the accelerating individual, community, and societal traumas generated by the global climate mega-emergency. This involves returning the responsibility for sustaining mental wellness and resilience to where it existed for most of human history and has the greatest chances of success: to the neighborhood and community levels.
His other books include:
Transformational Resilience: How Building a Culture of Human Resilience Can Safeguard Society and Increase Wellbeing (Greenleaf Publishing 2016) describes how climate disasters and toxic stresses affect individual and collective health and wellbeing, and methods to build human resilience at the personal, organizational, and community levels to prevent widespread harm and increase wellbeing. Shortly after publication it was called “My go to book for hope” by journalist Marc Bekoff in Psychology Today.
From Me to We: The Five Transformative Commitments Required to Rescue the Planet, Your Organization, and Your Life (Greenleaf Publishing, 2012) describes five key principles that organizations and individuals can adopt to direct them on a path toward true ecological and social sustainability and restoration.
The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How to Create a Positive Future for the Climate, The Planet and Your Life (Earthscan Publishing, 2008) describes how individuals can examine and adjust their core assumptions and beliefs–their mental models– to think and act in ways that enhance personal, social, and ecological well-being. In the summer of 2010 this book was deemed by Audubon Magazine to be one of the “eleven most important books on climate change.”
Leading Change Toward Sustainability: A Change Management Guide for Business, Government, and Civil Society (Greenleaf Publishing, 2003) describes a systems-based approach to organizational change that can move public and private organizations toward true ecological sustainability. Just six months after it was released the book was deemed one of the “ten most important publications in sustainability” by a GlobeScan survey of international sustainability experts.