The Lancet recently published a preprint of a significant study by psychologists at the University of Bath who surveyed 10,000 young people (aged 16-25) in ten different countries. The researchers found that over 50% felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless about the future, and 60% reported feeling ‘worried’ about climate change. The report of the research goes on to observe that young people also feel that their governments are not doing enough to avert or ameliorate climate change, and feel unheard and powerless. This is important research that is helping to inform and shape the ongoing public debate about climate change. However, it’s clear that the report’s insights into young people’s feelings about the future illuminate more than the emergence of ‘climate anxiety’.
Back in the 1980s, psychologists proposed the idea of ‘futurelessness’ when studying how young people responded to the threat of nuclear war. They gave up believing in and planning for a future. However, this idea goes back even further to how a previous generation of young people engaged in global protests at the Vietnam War, racism, and the beginning of ecological concerns. At a MIT teach-in, the radical scientist George Wald addressed the young people before him, describing them as ‘a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future’. In the past two decades, cultural and intellectual figures have suggested that feelings of futurelessness have returned and become more pervasive, in which ‘the future feels foreclosed, rather than open and expanding’, and is seen as an ‘unavoidable catastrophe’. Governmental inaction - or at the least slow action - in response to climate change is only one dimension to how young people might feel that their futures have been thrown into doubt. The long-established idea that young people ‘are the future’ has been undermined by hikes in higher education tuition fees in the UK and the rise in the cost of living, a growing generational divide influenced by new technology and major political developments such as Brexit, and lack of action on the climate emergency.
Data presents the outlook as bleak. Research from The Prince’s Trust showed that the pandemic has left many feeling increasingly worried about their individual job prospects: a quarter (24 per cent) say the pandemic has destroyed their career hopes, while one in five (21 per cent) feel scared that their skills and training are no longer useful. Major global developments, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency, put into doubt the ability of young people to achieve this desired future for themselves, something which earlier generations perhaps tended to take for granted. Despite this, evidence shows that young people still possess optimism about their ability to change the future. The same Prince’s Trust research suggests that three-quarters of young people in the UK (74 per cent) agree with the statement “my generation can change our future for the better”, while over a third of young people (37 per cent) feel powerless to change their own future and nearly one in three (31 per cent) think that their opinions on issues don’t matter. The picture is therefore a complex one. The findings of the 2019 National Youth Social Action Survey also indicates a decline in young people engaging with social action in any form, since this survey began in 2014. This includes participation in social campaigns, fundraising for charity, or giving time to help others. Moreover, those "reluctant" to participate in social action increased from 17% in 2016 to 25% in 2019. Nikunen and Korvajarvi in their 2020 study found that overall, young people wanted to lead happy, ‘ordinary’ lives, where the ‘vision is to have a job or occupation for which they have been educated, or to complete an education that they are interested in and then enter employment.’
But there are also public figures such as Greta Thunberg who appear to epitomize the response of a generation increasingly repelled by the future that they have been taught to expect from childhood. In numerous speeches, Thunberg rejects the ‘fairytale of eternal economic growth’, which Gaya Herrington shows is projected to lead to catastrophe. Scholars in Childhood Studies have pointed to the need to consider children as ‘knowledgeable social actors [who can] act as agents of change’. Yet young people are rarely offered the opportunity by those in positions of power and authority to have much of an opportunity to see their chosen futures acted on. One recent study places the majority of young people as ‘All-round optimists’ – individuals who are positive about the impact of technology and on future society, they are also distrustful of ‘those people and organisations they believe have the most power to shape the future’. This suggests that young people are able to visualise a positive collective future for themselves; however, its realisation is hampered by the perceived irresponsibility or non-responsiveness of older generations. Increasingly, children and young people appear to be blindsided in education and society. For example, in the US, high schoolers are ‘taught a rosy narrative of American life [...] creat[ing] cognitive dissonance’ when it comes to issues of racial injustice. Globally, the same is true of the climate crisis. At the onset of the Fridays For Future movement in the UK, then-PM Theresa May expressed her disapproval of student strikes, stating that children should be in school in order to learn how to tackle the problem. As ‘a generation in search of a future’, young people today navigate the challenges and uncertainties of rising education costs, precarious employment, as well as emerging and shifting new norms and expectations that often go against those of older generations. At the same time as they pursue ‘happy and ordinary’ lives that are presented as possible for all regardless of background, there is also a sense of a collective future being destroyed by actions taken in the present.
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted many to reassess the society they live in and the person they want to be within it. Young people in particular report being more motivated to make changes since the developments of the past eighteen months, with 66 per cent saying the political events of the year have made them want to fight for a better future, citing Black Lives Matter and the environmental emergency as their main influences. We welcome this research on young people’s feeling of anxiety, fear and powerlessness when it comes to climate change. However, from our perspective, the debate and response needs to go beyond the focus on ‘climate anxiety’ itself and its potential consequences in daily life. The challenge is to properly recognize and involve groups of diverse young people so that their voices are not consistently unheard or ignored, and to empower them to address the urgencies of now so that a better future can be achieved.
Written by: Alice Manning and Richard Tutton