Creative Communication Approaches to Youth Climate Engagement: Using Speculative Fiction and Participatory Play to Facilitate Young People’s Multidimensional Engagement With Climate Change

Abstract

Climate communication calls for new climate stories that move beyond apocalyptic imaginings. This article focuses on the role of young people in the collective reimagining of climate change through an interdisciplinary creative youth project that used speculative fiction and participatory play to enable a group of 14- to 15-year-olds in the United Kingdom to produce their own climate communications. Cocreated with a third-sector arts partner and evaluated through participant observation and questionnaires, the project found that creative and participatory approaches encouraged sociocultural and emotional engagements with climate change, increasing young people’s feelings of efficacy. Yet, it also found that young people need careful support in understanding climate change as a multidimensional issue and in facilitating more positive and transformative climate-futures thinking. Interdisciplinary and creative climate communication education work thus needs to be prioritized to facilitate young people’s collective and socially transformative engagements with climate change.