Community organising and engaging young people with climate change research and policies

The inclusion of young people in climate change and palaeoclimate research has never been more important. There is a general uncertainty for our long-term future that is felt more within the young people within society, with climate anxiety a source of concern. Communication around climate change and palaeoclimate research to the general public is often in the form of education and traditional public engagements, such as social media, blogs and the press. 

Through work with Citizens UK, a diverse people-powered alliance of civil society institutions, we are working with a group of young people (aged 14-18) from a mixture of schools and city centre youth clubs based in deprived areas to create YouCAP, a youth climate advisory panel in the city of Birmingham. This work is linked to a larger NERC-funded project (C-FORCE) that is focusing on climate change in the past. We are training young people in broad-based community organising techniques, empowering them to speak to those in positions of power, like local councillors and leaders, and to conduct a local listening campaign about policy related to climate change. The first cohort of YouCAP participants found a general apathy for climate change issues in their communities, with many people naming personal issues such as the cost of living crisis or housing problems as higher priorities. The young people went on to create a podcast exchanging perspectives with those in power, with guests including a local councillor involved in city wide sustainability efforts, a scientist from the C-FORCE project, and a PhD student researching critical metals for the energy transition. Already YouCAP played a critical role in making climate change a national priority for Citizens UK and  leveraged the podcast recording with the local councillor to extract a promise of organising a youth climate assembly about local climate policy in the near future.

This work is ongoing, with continuous recruitment of new members of YouCAP, as well as the development of relationships with other key partners. Our final aim is to enact change at a local level with the work we have been doing with the young people through discussions around climate-related policies with local government leaders. By conducting this community engagement within the larger sphere of an international multi-disciplinary science project, a greater understanding of how the project outputs are absorbed by communities will be gained and trusting relationships will be formed with local communities, which is needed to convey the issues surrounding climate change to the public.