International Measures of Youth Participation in Climate Protests

• In Event: Climate and Environmental Protests as Education

Proposal

Globally, awareness of climate change and its deleterious effects have been on the rise. Recent polls (2019 and 2021) conducted in 121 countries by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation found that two-thirds of respondents rated Climate Change as a somewhat serious or very serious threat (Bruine de Bruin & Duga, 2022). In 53 of these countries over 80% of respondents articulated this view. And yet, despite significant majorities of citizens concerned with the threat of climate change, governments have not only been slow in taking steps to decarbonize the economy, but also in developing whole-of-government efforts to fund and implement climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, including through formal and non-formal education and training programs.

Governmental inertia has led many young people (and their supporters) to engage in direct climate action as well as to call for expanding climate-focused education. In addition to signing on-line petitions and expressing their views on social media sites, youth have increasingly been organizing protests, strikes and other forms of direct action to address what they perceive as an existential risk (Han & Wuk Ahn, 2020). Many such protests are supported by transnational coalitions of youth – for example, Fridays for Future, the Extinction Rebellion, and Global Climate Strike. Regardless of the political power they may garner through elections, many youth believe that organized climate protests are a critical strategy to make their voices heard and effect real and timely change in relation to the climate crisis. The involvement and organization of school-age youth in diverse forms of climate activism deserve careful consideration and scrutiny.

The Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) Project, a six-year partnership grant funded by the Canadian government, seeks to enhance the quality and quantity of CCE globally. Its partners include over 100 leading scholars and agencies, including UNESCO and UNFCCC. Among the Project's primary activities is the development of a suite of global indicators to track national and global progress across 6 components of climate communication and education (CCE) as defined by the UNFCCC’s Action for Climate Empowerment program (https://unfccc.int/ace). One of these components is defined as Public Participation (UNESCO, 2020). Youth led climate protests and direct climate actions constitute an important measure of Public Participation. With this in mind, the MECCE project has been working with partners to review different strategies to measure the nature and extent of youth involvement in climate actions in countries around the world.

Constructing youth oriented indicators that capture participation in climate protests present significant challenges. For example, in 2023 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace created the first international database on climate protests, which measures climate actions in over 40 countries. Thus far, however, this effort is limited to English language sources. In addition, estimates of the number of protesters are oftentimes unreliable (i.e., authorities and organizers typically report very different numbers). Issues of country coverage, data reliability and data validation need to be addressed if valid indicators of youth participation in climate protests are to be developed.

In this paper, we discuss the challenges accompanying the construction of global measures of youth participation in climate protests and explore how these compare with strategies to create other global indicators of CCE. In particular we seek to address the following questions:
-What should be the appropriate scale and directionality of an indicator (is more protests necessarily better)?
-How does one measure youth climate protests in contexts in which such demonstrations and direct actions may be unlawful or in opposition to societal norms?
-How are youth protests today similar or different to those that took place in earlier decades?
-What, if anything, does youth involvement in climate protests reveal about the likelihood for youth action in other spheres?
The paper concludes with a concrete set of recommendations for a CCE indicator focused on youth climate action.

Authors

• Aaron Redman, Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education MECCE Project

• Aaron Benavot, University at Albany-State University of New York

• Eva-Maria Waltner, University of Education Freiburg