Climate Crisis and Citizenship
Guest blog by Allen Webb, author of Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis
The climate crisis has two causes: the release of greenhouse gases, and the failure of governments to control and stop those releases.
More than 60% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been released in the last 35 years, since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed by 198 countries.
A fundamental principle of nearly all societies, religions, and legal systems is that the next generation receives a world suitable for them to live in. Yet, modern nations are failing young people.
Annual greenhouse gases continue to increase. 2023, 2024, and so far 2025 are the hottest years not only in recorded history, but in at least the last 125,000 years – long before our ancestors left Africa. The last 12 months global temperatures were more than 1.5ºC hotter than the preindustrial era, the target of the 2017 Paris Agreement set for 2100 reached 75 years too soon.
The climate emergency is a matter of science, certainly, but it is also, and more importantly, a failure of governments, thus a failure of citizenship, and a failure of citizenship education.
As a starting point our students need to be learning about how young people are emerging as citizen activists trying to protect their future.
Our students can research student protest, read and view the accounts, memoirs, and videos of youth climate activists, learn about youth-led climate organizations, study youth-led lawsuits demanding government action. Climate youth activists can be found in almost all communities and make excellent classroom and school speakers. Understanding intergenerational justice and how to join in climate action should be components of citizen education.
Since climate change is a complex, “wicked” problem, in addition to the scientific facts, citizenship educators can draw on students’ imaginative capacity. Students can read climate fiction (“cli-fi”) short stories, novels, and novel excerpts that portray anticipated events in their own lifetimes, that set forward solutions, and/or highlight young people taking action. Students can write and share their own climate stories, both real world and fictional, as a way of influencing others.
Indeed, citizenship education should centre on students understanding how their voices can be heard. Finding ways to talk about the problem with others, making statements and speeches, addressing local as well as governmental audiences, using public media and new technologies all these are manifestations of citizen action our students can participate in.
Among young people as well as adults the climate crisis creates anxiety, even depression or despair. Citizenship educators have a responsibility for teaching the truth about the crisis, and, at the same time, addressing hopelessness by establishing ways for their students to imagine alternatives and take action.
Written by twenty teachers elementary through college, the new book Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis provides examples of this kind of climate change citizenship education, and more. The collection explores the climate crisis drawing on systems thinking, ecocriticism, climate fiction, indigenous and decolonial perspectives, critical media literacy and media production, place-based learning and sustainability, and student writing and speaking. These teachers show their students engaging in climate inquiry, examining questions of climate justice, getting their voices heard, and taking citizen action.
