Youth in Focus
Featured Advancing Intergenerational Collaboration in Climate Change Responses to Achieve Health and Environmental Co-benefits
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angel Kennedy
Children/youth experience increasing levels of mental health distress from direct and indirect effects of the climate crisis. This underscores the need to work upstream through an intergenerational climate justice, equity, and eco-social lens to promote the resilience, health, and wellbeing of children and youth. Youth are a significant stakeholder in the climate crisis yet continue to be excluded from playing meaningful roles in shaping climate governance and designing sustainable futures. This research, therefore, explores how taking intergenerational approaches to climate change mitigation strategies can foster the co-benefits of creating more equitable, creative, and asset-based sustainability pathways and improving the mental health of youth; and summarize existing principles to guide effective intergenerational climate change collaborations. I will describe findings from a suite of two sub-projects: (1) a scoping review of literature on intergenerational collaborations for climate change; and (2) semi-structured interviews with educators about how to approach grounded hope-based climate change education. Findings from the scoping review and interviews provide insights into how to integrate intergenerational collaborations in climate change decision-making, as well as opportunities for linking art and creativity to environmental efforts to foster co-benefits for youth. This suite of projects moves to action a growing body of evidence on advancing collaborative, intersectoral and governance relevant initiatives that generate meaningful change at the local level through bolstering children and youth’s mental health resilience, intergenerational climate justice, and children/youth in all policies.
Teaching “Food Physics” : One Scientist’s Response to Improving Climate Change Literacy by Transforming the Kitchen into a Climate Mitigation Makerspace View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carla Ramsdell
The physics of food and cooking (PHY 2220) is a relatively new general education course offered in the physics and astronomy department at Appalachian State University and connects our food system to climate change. Requiring no prior physics knowledge and taught in a mainly conceptual fashion, it attracts students from diverse backgrounds to become agents of change for the climate change solution. This course content provides literacy of basic thermodynamics such as specific heat, modes of heat transfer and phase change using the approachable topic of cooking to which most students can easily relate. Once this basic literacy has been established, it can then be applied to the climate system, providing firm foundational knowledge of the climate crisis. Additionally, the evolution of this course has had farther-reaching impacts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this course had to be converted to an online course. Students purchased basic laboratory equipment and met on zoom, each from their kitchen as we cooked together and gathered data. This provided a community at a time when student communities were especially difficult to foster. Based on the success of this online transition, a new program has been initiated on our campus to help improve the cooking skills of a broader student population via zoom cooking classes. These voluntary classes target food-insecure students. Our hope is that this class can be scaled to other campuses to improve climate literacy and make students more resilient in their food knowledge, lessening food’s negative impact on our planet.
Climate Concern and Eco-anxiety in BC Youth: Findings from the Youth Development Instrument View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Judy Wu
Emerging terms in the literature such as eco-anxiety describe heightened concern, fear, and anxiety related to the climate crisis. As the climate emergency grows in urgency, eco-anxiety could precipitate new psychological conditions and worsen existing mental illnesses. This is of particular concern among youth, who are likely to experience repeated stressors related to the climate crisis and are in a developmental period characterized by peak onset of mental health disorders. Recent efforts have attempted to measure eco-anxiety within the population; however, extant research is largely focused on adults. Consequently, this study’s objectives were to assess levels of climate concern and eco-anxiety among BC students. To do so, items measuring climate concern and eco-anxiety were included on the Youth Development Instrument, a population-level well-being survey of Grade 11 students in BC. Survey participants included 9255 students (45.8% female; 2.8% gender minorities). Many students were worried about climate change (78.2%) and felt greater action should be taken (82.4%). A smaller proportion reported experiences of eco-anxiety, with at least 42.6% feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge due to the environment in the past two weeks. Climate concern and eco-anxiety is a significant stressor in youth. Developing resources to help youth cope will be a pressing priority in coming years. Schools may serve as a unique opportunity to employ eco-anxiety programming and resources to help support this age group during the climate crisis.
