Climate anxiety needs climate solutions

I recently attended the online launch of a new campaign called Climate Courage Schools. An initiative from the Climate Majority Project, the campaign calls for ’emotionally aware’ climate education in schools. They argue that there is growing disconnect between what children are taught in school about climate change and about the future, and what they see unfolding around them.

“As it stands,” they argue in a launch report, “education in no way reflects the scale or urgency of the challenge, or indeed the many opportunities and benefits of meaningful, effective climate action. Instead, school is preparing students for a world that no longer exists – where careers are linear, economies are stable, and ‘change’ means small tweaks to business-as-usual.”

Young people see this disconnection and get disillusioned. They worry, and they do not see their worries acknowledged. According to figures cited by Climate Courage Schools, 62% of young people are anxious about climate change. 67% are afraid. 56% believe ‘humanity is doomed’.

In response, the campaign call for leadership and inspiring climate action. They suggest training staff to recognise and deal with “climate-related emotions”, and weaving “emotionally aware climate learning, nature connection and systems thinking through every subject.”

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this, but I do think it’s missing something. Consider this experience: on Friday I took part in the North Herts Climate Summit. Secondary schools from across the region got together for a day of climate education and action. I did some workshops and then manned an exhibition stand for the afternoon. On my stand I had a question, as did every other stand, encouraging students to visit all of them and find the answers. My question was this:

What is happening to carbon emissions in the UK? Are they
a) rising b) levelling off c) falling slowly, or d) falling fast?

I asked this question to groups of children as they came to the stand over the course of the afternoon, probably around a hundred children and their teachers. Not a single one of them knew the right answer. “It’s just the UK, not global emissions”, I prompted them just in case. Still, almost every single one of them said a), emissions in the UK were rising.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that it’s option number four. Emissions in the UK have been falling for my entire lifetime. We are halfway to net zero, and our task is to build on this progress and finish the job. I explained this to the children, and then got them to explore climate solutions and vote for the ones they’d like to see in their schools.

Both my stand and my workshops last week were about climate solutions, and children left them feeling empowered and positive about the role they could play.

If young people are depressed about the climate, is it simply that they don’t know what the solutions are, and that the solutions are working? If so, then maybe what we need in education is not so much space for climate grief and emotionally sensitive discussions – important though that might be. Maybe what we need is more focus on solutions.

Solutions are absent from the curriculum, because the Conservative government considered them political. They are absent from the media because incremental progress isn’t news. You won’t get them from the climate movement either, because a core tenet of green thinking is that not enough is being done. It’s little wonder that many young people think we’re doomed.

In the Climate Courage Schools report, the word ‘anxiety’ appears 15 times and ‘distress’ is used nine times. There is one passing mention of solutions, and it appears in a case study rather than the main text. This isn’t a campaign that will do much to redress the balance. Not that it’s passive and overly concerned with ‘inner work’ – it’s full of calls to action too. But it focuses on giving young people tools to deal with the bad news, rather than drawing their attention to good news.

I’m not a naive optimist. I know about tipping points, climate injustice, how much of the world could be uninhabitable by 2070. I also work on climate solutions every day. I see how they inspire and motivate, how the culture of schools and organisations can be transformed, how the possibility of change captures the imagination of young people.

I see the value of Climate Courage Schools and will recommend them where appropriate. But I wish they’d made space for an extra call to action, because it might be the one that will make the biggest difference: tell stories of climate success. Share solutions, and celebrate those delivering them. Bring those stories in from all over the world. Tell them creatively, and tell them relentlessly.