How can we use the arts to unlock climate conversations with young people?

The effects of climate change are being felt across the world, and with these changes come personal fears and anxieties. In a 2021 study, it was found that almost 60% of the young people surveyed were either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ worried about climate change. So how can we, in the arts, help? What can we do to help alleviate this anxiety, and how can we use climate stories creatively to inspire change?  We discussed this in summer Masterclass session: How can we use the arts to unlock climate conversations with young people?

Reflections from our host Dr Matt Winning

Communication of climate change is a tricky balance. The enormity of the issue can be overwhelming. So often it’s a case of offsetting the doom with positives. Treading a fine line between impacts and the actions, the positives and the negatives. The arts can play a key role in helping us all truly process and express the wide range of emotions that the climate crisis creates – of holding fear and hope simultaneously. We can’t fix everything and sometimes you firstly need to truly sit in the dark to help your eyes adjust and move out of it. Young people in particular feel many of these issues immensely strongly from a developmental perspective and because it is an uncertain world they are inheriting.

The Masterclass was two hours of deep sharing of best practices and experiences from across the world on using the arts to unlock climate conversations with young people. Firstly, the three guests were introduced one by one, all sharing their background, expertise and favourite pieces of climate art which included a poem, a book and an art installation. This helped set the scene for how people engage in a personal way with a topic that can often seem enormous, abstract and overly scientific. Then an ice breaker audience participation session of free writing led by Greg Klerkx helped all participants to get creative and bring the entire room together with a shared activity that worked well with a white board. Then began a wide-ranging discussion that coalesced around a number of key learnings, examples and takeaways that are summarised below.

Top takeaways from our speakers:

Dr Matt Winning

Matt is a Lecturer (Teaching) in Economics of Sustainability at the University College London and a stand-up comedian who performs live comedy shows about the climate, author of: 'Hot Mess: What On Earth Can We Do About Climate Change'

Long-term engagement requires top level to buy-in e.g. headteachers.
Sometimes we need to sit with children and NOT solve their problems.
You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Whatever offering you have can probably be redesigned to be about climate.

The climate connected artwork that resonated with me is: The People vs Climate Change documentary 

Heena

Heena Dave – currently working towards her PhD, Heena is the co-founder of Climate Adapted Pathways for Education (CAPE), and started her career as a flood warning expert and research manager at the Environment Agency. Heena is also a co-author of 'Cracking Key Concepts in Secondary Science.' 

The idea of sitting in the darkness. When asked about climate change, children often speak about fear, anger, sadness and uncertainty. Our instinct as adults can be to reassure them or quickly move them toward hope, but children often need someone willing to remain with those emotions, creating a compassionate space where they can be expressed and explored honestly. The arts make this possible, offering another language for conversations that are often too difficult for words alone.
The importance of slow, meaningful support. The arts invite us to pause, notice and reflect rather than rushing towards solutions. They create opportunities for children and young people to make meaning at their own pace, carefully curating a journey that begins with connection and imagination before exploring more challenging questions. In doing so, the arts remind us that climate change education is as much about creating space for reflection as it is about sharing knowledge.
The final reflection is one that speaks to us as adults. Supporting children and young people begins with tending to our own climate emotions. If we never pause to reflect on our own hopes, grief or despair, accompanying children and young people through theirs becomes much harder. Creative practice offers us that opportunity too, encouraging us to approach these conversations about climate change with humility, authenticity and care rather than feeling we must always have the answers.

For me, this is the power of the arts. They create spaces where children and young people can express what matters to them, where adults can learn to listen differently, and where shared creativity can become the beginning of understanding, connection and collective action.

The climate connected artwork that resonated with me is: Abbas Zahedi: Begin Again | Tate Modern  

Greg

Greg Klerkx – a facilitator, producer and writer with a deep belief in the positive creative potential of every human being. In 2023 Greg started The Climate Shift, a project that uses creative activities to explore how a deeper connection to nature can open more space for climate-positive action in our personal and professional lives. 

Educators and creatives need to connect with their own feelings about the climate crisis to effectively engage with children and young people. Climate anxiety amongst educators is well-documented; almost uniquely among school subjects, climate change is an event that affects both teachers and their students on a daily basis. There’s real value in carving out time with teachers, whether in staff meetings or more formal inset/CPD settings, to explore what’s happening for them in response to this very real-time event. As for creatives: how often do we have opportunities to gather, explore, and share our climate responses? How valuable might such gatherings be for our emotional health and what might they open for our work in this space?
Arts-led explorations of climate anxiety have unique value because they offer multiple pathways into a subject that can sometimes feel exposing or otherwise challenging, particularly in group settings. If you’re a creative, what aspects of your practice might you be able to adapt to help educators and students ’step sideways’ into this sensitive topic? How do you as a practitioner need to show up differently to help land this kind of connecting practice?
Quite a lot about the climate crisis feels beyond our control, because it is: we can’t stop global leaders, whether in government or industry, from acting against the planet’s interests. But rather than talk about what we can or can’t control, how does it reframe our sense of agency to talk about what we can take charge of? This might include who we talk to about the climate crisis, and even whether we talk about it at all (many studies say most people don’t). It might involve how we use our money, how we vote, how we identify and live our values in a warming world. All of us have this kind of agency. It’s up to us to use it and if enough of us do, that’s when real change happens.

The climate connected artwork that resonated with me is: Awake in the Floating City Novel by Susanna Kwan 

Jigyasa:

Jigyasa Labroo - co-founder and CEO of Slam Out Loud, an arts and social-emotional learning organization working in public school systems in India. Slam Out Loud integrates climate education through the arts, using an SEL-first approach that prioritizes emotional safety, curiosity, and self-efficacy, so that children move from climate anxiety to agency. Their team has recently completed a randomized evaluation of this approach with independent researchers from Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute. Jigyasa and Greg also co-created Love and Fear in a Warming World.

Climate conversations with children need to begin with emotional safety, not information overload. Facts matter, but facts without containment can create fear and paralysis.
- For me, the goal is not to remove climate anxiety. Some anxiety is a very human response to what is happening. The goal is to ensure that anxiety does not become helplessness. When children are given safe, creative ways to name what they love, what they fear, and what they want to protect, they begin to see themselves not only as inheritors of a crisis, but as people with voice, imagination and the ability to act.
The arts allow children to hold love and fear together. They create room for grief, care, imagination, memory and agency — often before children have the technical vocabulary of climate change.
- At Slam Out Loud, we have been sitting with this question for some time: how do we speak to children about a warming world in a way that is honest but not overwhelming? We are still learning, but what we are seeing is that the arts offer a powerful way to begin with emotional safety, curiosity and self-efficacy before moving into climate content. Children do not experience climate change only through fear. They also experience it through love - love for trees, rivers, animals, homes, seasons, families, memories and futures. When we create spaces where children can hold both love and fear together, they are more able to stay with the complexity of climate change without shutting down
Agency does not have to mean children immediately becoming activists. It can begin with writing a poem, asking a question, noticing change in one’s community, sharing a story, or imagining a different future.
- We are learning that when children are supported to process climate change through the arts and through self-efficacy first, they are more willing to engage with climate content and less likely to shut down.
Children from disadvantaged communities are not outside the climate conversation. Many are already living with heat, pollution, flooding, disrupted schooling and environmental instability. The challenge is not that they do not care; it is that climate conversations are often not designed in ways that recognize their experiences, knowledge and voice. Even their culture and identity.