By: Gabrielle Erawoc, Communications and Events Intern, SDSN Youth

In April 2026, SDSN Youth continued its new project, “A Youth Vision for the World's Future” (AYVWF), in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, with a second series of regional dialogues, this time focused on climate change and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13. SDSN Youth convened four consultations, bringing together youth participants from across Africa, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe to reflect on how climate change is already reshaping their lives, and what must change in the policy landscape to meet the urgency of the moment.

Through these conversations, AYVWF continued to center youth voices in shaping policy recommendations for a more sustainable and equitable world, gathering lived experiences and forward-looking solutions from young leaders across sectors and geographies.

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The State of Climate Change

With less than five years remaining to achieve the SDGs, the gap between climate commitments and climate reality has never been more glaring. SDG 13 calls for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, with an emphasis on inclusion, capacity building, and the meaningful participation of women, youth, and marginalized communities. 

Consultation participants made clear across every region that progress on these fronts remains deeply uneven. Extreme weather events are intensifying. Coastlines are eroding. Droughts and floods are disrupting agricultural systems that entire communities depend on. The communities facing the sharpest consequences are almost never the ones shaping the response. As participants across all four consultations affirmed, climate change is already here and affecting the livelihoods of current and future generations.

Climate Change as a Social Crisis

Despite the vast differences in geography, governance, and lived context, several powerful and consistent themes emerged across all four regions. Participants pushed back against the tendency to treat climate change as primarily a technical or scientific problem. From the Amazon to Lake Victoria to coastal Ireland, young people described how rising temperatures, floods, and droughts are compounding existing inequalities affecting access to water, food, shelter, education, and health.

A participant from Brazil captured the sentiment widely shared across the Americas: "Climate change is not just an environmental issue, but it's also a social issue. And it disproportionately affects those who are already most vulnerable." In Africa, a participant from Chad echoed this framing, noting that in his context, "climate change is not just an environmental issue; it directly affects livelihoods, education, and peace." Participants from South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, and elsewhere reinforced the same point: climate change widens every preexisting gap.

Who Does the Burden Fall Hardest On 

Another recurring theme across regions was that women, children, rural communities, indigenous populations, and low-income households consistently bear the heaviest costs of climate change while receiving the least support in response. In Eswatini, for example, a participant noted that women and children in rural areas travel long distances to fetch water and firewood as weather patterns become more unpredictable. A participant from South Africa described how floods and droughts are linked to malnutrition in children's first thousand days of life, and how cascading effects from scarce resources ripple into domestic violence and community instability.

Similarly, a participant from Indonesia working in health care noted that "Climate change does not affect everyone equally. Vulnerable groups such as children, older people, women, and also poor people are hit the hardest because their adaptive capacity is very limited." This inequality is compounded, participants stressed, by the fact that the most affected communities are also the most consistently left out of the decisions being made about their futures.

Youth Are Not Being Invited to the Table 

No theme was more consistent across all four regional consultations than the exclusion of young people from climate decision-making. Participants described a landscape in which youth are consulted after decisions have already been made, referenced in policy documents but absent from the rooms where those documents are written, and mobilized as implementers rather than architects of climate action.

A participant from Botswana named this dynamic: "Young people… we're not even getting invited to the table, even though, honestly, we are the table." From South Africa, a participant drew the same conclusion: "The youth get included after decisions have been made and then have the brunt of having to implement policies that they had no role in participating in." In Nepal, a participant called for structural change, arguing that "youth and local people should be a part of decision-making, not just listening."

Across the Americas, participants noted that youth are rarely referenced in formal frameworks and documents, and that even when young people are brought into spaces, they often lack the resources and institutional backing to translate their participation into lasting impact.

Policy Needs Implementation for Progress

Across every region, participants pointed to a widening gap between what governments commit to on paper and what actually reaches the communities that need it most. Climate frameworks exist, nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs have been submitted, and emergency protocols have been announced. Yet, as participant after participant described, the lived experience on the ground tells a different story.

An individual from Ireland described how communities were left to individually fund responses to coastal erosion when government action failed to arrive. A participant from Greece noted that "Sometimes governments and policies like to throw the ball to climate change and blame it for everything instead of actually adopting policies and ways to adapt to protect the citizens." From Nigeria, a participant's contribution put it simply: "Young people are rarely consulted, so action needs to be taken to ensure this gap is filled." 

Local and Indigenous Knowledge at the Center of Solutions.

Another cross-cutting concern across regions was the routine exclusion of local and indigenous knowledge from formal climate responses. Whether in Nepal, Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, or Canada, participants described how solutions designed by distant institutions, without community input, often fail, while locally grounded approaches are the ones that actually work and last.

An individual from Morocco reflected on what this loss looks like in practice. He described watching the water source in his family's village slowly disappear: "That source is dry. That loss shows how climate change is not abstract; it is really changing our landscapes, our memories, and our way of life." He added that climate action in Africa "shouldn't depend solely on shifting global political agendas" and that "solutions should build on local knowledge and empower communities to lead."

In Indonesia, a participant working in renewable energy described a common failure mode: solar water pumping systems built by outside organizations that break down months later because no one trained the local community to maintain them. The lesson, drawn again and again across regions, was that technology and funding mean little without genuine partnership with the people most affected.

The Reality of Eco-Anxiety

In the European consultation, participants introduced a dimension that cut across the physical impacts of climate change: its toll on the mental health of young people. A participant from Ireland,  who is researching what she calls gratitude-based sustainability, argued that the dominant framing of climate communication, heavy on alarm and catastrophe, is itself a barrier to sustained action. "Urgency is good, it lights the fire," she said, "but it is not sustainable." She called for messaging that restores agency to young people rather than paralyzing them with fear, and added: "What you care for and what you're grateful for, you love and you strive to protect and sustain."

A participant from Spain similarly highlighted how the 2024 Valencia floods left lasting psychological damage among young people in the affected communities, damage that received far less attention than the physical rebuilding efforts. And she added that immigrant youth, despite being among the first to respond to the disaster, were among the last to receive government support.

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The Next Phase of the Project

Throughout this Spring, SDSN Youth will conduct its final set of regional consultations focused on the future of work. The insights gathered from all three rounds of consultations, on gender equality, climate action, and the future of work, will directly inform SDSN Youth's Recommendation Brief, set to be finalized and released in Summer 2026. This brief will elevate youth-driven solutions to global policymakers and institutions.

As the climate consultations made clear, young people are not waiting for permission to lead. They are documenting the loss, designing the solutions, and demanding that the institutions with the power to act move faster, reach further, and listen more. The question is not whether youth have something to contribute to climate action. It is whether the structures that govern our world will finally make room for them.

For more information, please visit the AYVWF page or contact youth@unsdsn.org.

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