What am I to do ?
The “multifaceted and intersecting challenges faced by young people today” (Youth Futures Under Construction) can easily generate a feeling of powerlessness. The authors list “conflict, insecurity, limited government support, deep-set gender discrimination, climate change, infectious disease and a widespread lack of decent jobs.”
In a broad study across Norway, Italy, Germany, and Austria the result confirms that while young people tend to increasingly position themselves as key actors in societal transformation they don’t always understand how they can act. As a 17-year-old Norwegian student expressed, “I feel very powerless … because I don’t have the opportunity to make the big differences. Therefore, I hope that we as a society have come further, so that individuals and politicians work together to stop/reduce climate change.” (Narratives of Change in Science Education)
The researchers involved in the project stress that education and educators must also work with students and go beyond scientific literacy so youths can “develop a sense of agency by understanding their place in the world and give them the tools to be active and reflexive citizens.” This includes fostering critical thinking and learning to “recognize and resist passively adopting ideological assumptions that prevent them from becoming meaningful historical actors.”
Desire to act
Numerous initiatives demonstrate how young people are being empowered to envision, co-create, and lead transformative climate futures. These projects reveal diverse approaches on youth agency and action, from collective imagining and participatory governance to educational empowerment and community-led environmental stewardship, demonstrating that there is a desire to act, but maybe not the space made for youth in the more institutional and organizational fields.
As the Enter Nusantara project (a youth-led initiative in Indonesia) reminds us, “Youth are not just ‘the future’ but active agents of the present, capable of shaping climate policy and reimagining how sustainability, justice, and finance intersect.” This perspective is an important learning from WTFutures as it is a challenge to today’s views (mainly fostered by adults) that see youths merely as future beneficiaries (in terms of political decisions), and offers to position them instead as vital participants in today’s urgent climate and social transformations.
Envisioning paths to action
Within the projects, we identified different paths to action, where initiatives are practicing or experimenting different tools with youths that lead to action. For example, the JustFutures initiative encapsulates this desired shift by engaging young people with varying levels of activism in collaborative projects designed to envision “a society where young people have an active role in constructing just climate futures.” The process values hands-on creativity, through solidarity-driven work: “utopian impulses and hope emerged, giving rise to ‘real’ utopias, practical visions of inclusive and negotiated future societies.” Hence framing the areas where youths could act in the direction of the future they envisioned.
Similarly, in Nepal, the Bagmati River Youth Project empowered youths to lead a six-week capacity-building project focused on local ecological restoration. The program was “not only a consultation, but a goal to transform youngsters into agents of change, able to take ownership and responsibility of their river.” With 196 participants completing the program and thousands more engaged virtually, youths conceived a “wide range of actions, from awareness raising programs to the production of vermicomposting units.” One young participant shared, “I want to share the experience when I led a few of my friends to make a group and start cleaning the jungle near our community … I realized how I can be the leader of change.”
Some young participants in the Net-Zero and You(th) project also ended up putting in place projects within their communities after participating in a series of workshops that helped them imagine and narrow down how they could be useful within their action scale.
Allowing youths to act on their terms
In Climate Futures in Brussels 2030, young voices articulated a clear desire for meaningful involvement beyond traditional protest: “Young people want to engage in climate action, but on new terms. Not just protest, but co-creation. Not just demands, but governance and world-building.” This aligns with El Futuro es Clima in Spain, which convened a “Metaforum” of 40 randomly selected young participants alongside a parallel group of 20 climate experts to deliberate on how to prioritize responses to climate inaction. Young participants emphasized how their highlighted priorities often differed from experts’ technical focus. In other words, in bringing in new ways of seeing things, it gave them perspective and a sense of usefulness, as they also understood “climate action” in their own terms.
Futures literacy and context driven action
In learning how to think critically, educational projects that mobilize different future approaches are fertile ground to deepen youths’ understanding on various climate related issues by providing new skills sets and in understanding complexities. In Kidding the Future, a project taking place in Pakistan, Umar Sheraz teaches futures literacy tools that invite youths to reflect on trends, investigate historical perspectives from elders in their communities, and collaboratively explore the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the perspective of expected, alternative, and preferred futures.
Activities such as the “time-traveler game” where students envision a child they love 30 years into the future, and collective exercises using the “Futures Triangle1” helped youths identify forces shaping their preferred futures. This allows a deepening of perspective in subjects that can sometimes seem set in stone, and adapting some “general realities” to the realities of a context, a country. One young participant observed, “You told us that SDGs are interconnected. If we had justice in our country, the other SDGs would’ve taken care of themselves.” By learning and opening up perspectives, youths are more equipped to understand where and how their actions can have meaning in their specific context, as not all actions are relatable from one country to the next.
Actions needed right away
Cross-cultural research, that take place in countries which are already living the effects of climate change, such as the Imagining 2060 study involving Taiwanese and Australian students, demonstrate that some students from vulnerable Pacific Island nations expressed deep concerns, “My preferred future cannot happen unless we take action right away” and recognizing the existential threats their homelands is facing with rising waters or other catastrophes. Enter Nusantara powerfully asserts that youths are “active agents of the present,” defending that their meaningful participation in fighting coal mines in Indonesia is crucial today for building sustainable, just futures that reflect the complexities of lived realities right now.
Within the WTFutures project, it is clear that youths are not and wish not to be just future stakeholders, but active agents shaping the world today in which they will be living tomorrow, affected by climate and social transformation. Here, there and around the world, they are co-creating, leading and acting in projects that reflect on policy, education, governance, and in their community. By amplifying young voices, providing spaces for experimenting with these approaches and integrating futures literacy into education, we can foster the critical thinking and the agency young people already have or, sometimes need to navigate uncertainty, challenge dominant narratives, identify areas of action and lead transformative change.
The Futures Triangle is a method to map forces of change and their interaction, categorizing them by their timeframe: the “push of the present”, the “pull of the future”, and the “weight of the past”. Learn more in this article.