Thousands of world leaders can’t seem to get a handle on climate change. But gather a group of young people together and they’ll show you how to do it.
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What does significant climate action look like? That’s the question News Decoder asked a group of students last week in a live videocast.
After the international environmental gathering called COP29 ended with a flurry of news stories reporting on disappointment and despair on the part of those who realize that climate change is a crisis that needs to be addressed now, News Decoder gathered seven teens from five countries to share their ideas about climate action.
Joining them was Karolina Krakowiak, an environment consultant who focuses on nature-based solutions for agriculture. And moderating the discussion was Amina McCauley, who heads a project for News Decoder called Empowering Youth through Environmental Storytelling.
One of the students, Sara, had recently been to the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Colombia, while Kandelaria had recently returned from Baku, Azerbaijan where she had attended COP29.
Sara said she had the opportunity talk to people from other parts of the world working to take care of the planet. One thing she took from the conference was the need to listen to people who are doing this.
“In my group I had this friend Sean that was part of a indigenous community. Indigenous people have found ways to protect the land around them because it is where they live,” she said. “He opened our eyes on how can we make that change with little steps. But eventually they’re going to become like something really big.”
Is climate activism a privilege?
Ama, a student at The Thacher School in the U.S. state of California grew up in Nigeria. She said that developing countries bear the brunt of climate change but they aren’t prepared to solve it. A problem, she noted, is that people can’t be expected to tackle a big problem like the climate if they are facing daily struggles like poverty, hunger or inadequate education.
“Education is incredibly important,” she said. “People will be more willing to do something about climate change if they are educated about it. So education must be a priority.”
There is a disconnect between the people in the Global North who are creating many of the climate problems and the people in the Global South who are experiencing the effects, like the women and girls of Nigeria.
Kandelaria said that one way to address this disconnect is to show the people in the Global North what is happening instead of simply telling them about it.
She attends Gimnasio Los Caobos in Bogota, Colombia with Sara and went to COP29. There she met with people who are already preparing for the next COP gathering, which will be in Brazil. “They want to make it a lot more physical,” she said. “We talk a lot about climate change and about deforestation. But how many of us have actually seen a forest that’s completely cut down? How many of us actually interact with a lot of the big topics that we discuss at these COPs?”
Show people the causes of climate change first hand.
By bringing people to the forests they can also learn how indigenous people have found ways to live sustainably and protect the plants and wildlife in these endangered regions. “It is basically like we have to take into account how are they working and also how can we help them so that they can help us,” Kandelaria said.
Aarohi in India described how her school started a movement to save mangrove trees in Mumbai, a city that is industrial and polluted.
“Mangroves as plants give a lot of oxygen so for a city that is so prone to pollution mangroves mean a lot,” Aarohi said. But people were cutting down the mangroves because they can produce a rotten smell.
In school, which was just a kilometer away from mangroves, she learned about their value. “They are the source of wildlife, they are the source of oxygen and we can’t just do away with them,” she said.
In second and third grades Aarohi’s school started a movement to stop the cutting down of mangroves. “We organized nature walks,” she said. “We organized awareness campaigns. We protested against the people of the community who were supporting the cause of cutting down mangroves and this is how this entire discussion started.”
Individual actions can have impact.
In Rwanda, Anderson attends Kepler College and has demonstrated how an individual can do things to improve the climate.
Anderson was studying how Western nations sent textile waste to Africa. “I found that they actually send 200 tons of textile waste,” she said. “Some of them are sold as secondhand clothing but mostly others are to be disposed of in Africa.”
In an entrepreneurship class, Anderson came up with the idea of turning some of the textile waste into affordable clothing. By doing that they could reduce the waste and reduce the importing of new clothes.
Aaorhi likened climate action to a chain. “It starts from the smallest thing to the largest,” she said. “We as students don’t hold the power to make large-scale decisions but we what we can do is make our community aware of what climate means to us and what will happen if it’s not there.”
Look again, she said, at the example of the mangrove. “If we do away with them it will cause such a drastic change change in our life, such a magnificent change that we can’t even imagine,” she said.
How to bring about systemic change
Valentina is a member of the Climate Academy at the European School Brussels II where the focus is on systemic change. She cautioned that individual action is power but we shouldn’t think that will solve the bigger problems.
“If I bike to school every day which I have done for like the past 10 years, I am doing my part to solve the climate crisis,” she said. “I think it is important but it’s quite frankly not enough especially since we’re being fed that this green transition is happening when in reality our climate emissions are only rising.”
The bigger change will only happen when leaders and corporations are held to account — when subsidies for fossil fuels are ended, for example, she said, and when we start prioritizing the environment over profits.
Karolina Krakowiak is a sustainability consultant and a former project manager for News Decoder’s WoW project, designed to help students combat climate change through journalism, activism and art. She agreed with Valentina and suggested three strategies for making a greater impact: First, push politicians and expect more from. Also young people should raise their voices. Second, put pressure on corporations. And third, use community initiatives like the one Aarohi described in Mumbai.
“Definitely political involvement does work because if we do not involve ourselves, then politicians they do whatever they want, or what they are told to do,” she said. “And they are influenced by what we expect because we are the ones voting for them, so let’s not forget that we do have power.”
Also, she said, boycotts and spotlighting the wrongdoings of corporations do work. “Because at the end of the day they also care about their consumers.”
Local initiatives are important, Karolina said, because the global issue is too overwhelming for most people.
“But we can focus more locally and have an actual impact on our community,” she said.
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.