The kids are alright. Are they? Exploring the intersection of climate change education, sustainability, and policy design for empowering youth - Alexandra Ciocănel & Andrada Istrate

Across the European Union, a youthful demographic (ages 15-34) is increasingly preoccupied with climate change and sustainability. Nevertheless, there is a significant gap between their intentions and actions, between what they would like to do and what they are able to do. Drawing on a more extensive study on climate change and youth in Romania and the EU, we focus on a problem space that centres around education as the main domain for co-productive interventions that could address this gap. In our research, when discussing youth engagement with climate change, the experts and young people interviewed champion education as a sine qua non condition for empowering youth. However, there is a pervasive structural misunderstanding among policymakers and experts about the perspectives, interests, ways of learning, and thought processes of the youth. T ...