From awareness to action: engaging youth in the green economy and climate action

Youth are often at the forefront of climate activism for the simple reason of the time perspective: they are likely to be profoundly affected by the long-term consequences of climate change. Hence young people have been calling for urgent transformation of ecologically harmful practices and expressing concern that action is not moving fast enough. And young people have evidence to back their call: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2022) for long had the same message: the window of opportunity to secure a sustainable future is closing rapidly.

Youth should be an integral part of the European Union’s ambitious priority to become the first climate neutral continent and lead on international efforts to address environmental challenges across the world. To support that aim, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the European Training Foundation (ETF) partnered to explore young people’s knowledge, perceptions and ideas about the climate crisis, including if they feel they have meaningful opportunities for their voices to be heard in climate policies. This report aims to not only give voice to the young generation most affected by climate change, but also to help guide policymakers on how to prepare our education and employment systems, investing in young people’s human capital for a green future.
Using U-Report, UNICEF’s flagship social messaging and online engagement platform, the geographic scope of this report covers 21 countries in the European and Central Asian regions, as well as the numerous host countries where young Ukrainians were residing at the time of the polls. We were lucky to have representatives of YOUNGO, or the Youth Climate Movement, the official children and youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), lend their expertise to us and participate in the design and selection of U-Report poll questions. A special thanks goes to DARYA – Dialogue and action for resourceful youth in Central Asia, the European Union’s first-ever regional project supporting young people in Central Asia, implemented by ETF. The DARYA project was instrumental in supporting the participation of young people in the Central Asian sub-region, contributing to the high number of responses and in selecting several questions for the poll.

Adolescents and young people who answered this poll told us that social media is their main source of information about climate change and disaster risk. This result presents indeed a unique opportunity of scale to educate masses of young people on environmental issues. But it poses challenges for quality and accuracy, too, including that of disinformation. Respondents also expressed ambivalence on the role of technological fixes in addressing climate change, showing that while some youth can grasp the complexity of needing both technological but also societal and structural change, many would need more education on the subject.

However, a vast majority of young people do not feel like their current education prepares them for life in a green economy. This should worry all policymakers. In particular, many adolescents and young people believe that governments bear a significant share of
responsibility for taking action, alongside various other stakeholders such as international organisations and the private sector. Despite this, respondents reported low confidence that governments will keep their promises on climate change and said there are not enough opportunities for children and young people to express their views on environmental policies in their country.

This report presents several implications for policymakers, touching on both education and youth engagement. These include enhancing the outreach of communication on climate action to youth, establishing and/or promoting climate policy engagement platforms and a more intensive integration of climate change education into curricula. Moreover, it suggests ways forward to enhance green job readiness and skills development of young people to support their human capital development, including fostering holistic understandings of climate solutions.

This is the fourth report of ETF and UNICEF, where the organisations have joined forces to deliver the voices and opinions of young people to policymakers, so that their policies and programmes can be more responsive to the realities of young people. Joint action is needed now more than ever to address climate change, requiring new and transformational partnerships among all stakeholders across Europe, and around the world. For young people in Europe and Central Asia, our common goal remains to support their quest for a sustainable and green future for themselves and for all.