2022 Future of Global Governance Series

Proceedings for Panel Discussion on Engaging Young Leaders

by the Center for Global Agenda (CGA) at Unbuilt Labs at the UN General Assembly Science Summit

29 September, 2022

Abstract

We are pleased to engage panelists on the subject of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Literacy, and Education.

Excerpts

Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Inez Harker-Schuch, Ph.D. (Co-founder, The Planet Academy; Researcher and Environmental Scientist):

IHS: Systems thinking allows us to – as we have the SDGs, put the SDGs into a concept that we can understand and interpret. We can also interpret them regionally, culturally, internationally, nationally and all these different ways. I think that is very important: this idea of how we see ourselves, because climate and sustainable issues of climate change is different for everybody. Someone who is living, let us say, in America you call them hurricanes, elsewhere they are called cyclones. In these areas, cyclones and hurricanes have a social dimension and they are associated with climate change. But for people in Europe, there is no association with that whatsoever. In fact, they do not realize that cyclones and hurricanes are one of the worst environmental disasters that we will experience as their frequency and magnitude increases.

IHS: I have had some major inroads on climate literacy and engaging young leaders during my career, looking at how we communicate sustainability issues. Very frequently, instead of actually looking at the system itself, we have been looking at fear appeals and we have been looking at impacts – we have been trying to get people emotional about the issue and then we have been very upset when they have reacted emotionally to this problem. The communication efforts have all included these very strong emotive responses – we are all going to die. In almost every media outlet when they are portraying climate change, they are talking about a hopeless future. How could that possibly motivate young people to become engaged with the issue of climate change when they have the basic response to fight or flight?

IHS: One of the things we have to do is we have to remove the fear out of the climate literacy area and put more of a rationale into that. We have to explain the climate problem as a system and not just discuss the impacts, but also discuss the physical mechanisms that describe it before we start thinking about the anthropogenic change. When I think about education, which has been a constant theme throughout here, I think about the idea of democratizing knowledge. We assume that knowledge is shared equally and we assume that democracy is somehow something we have in our civil society that everybody has access to. But democracy only takes place when we all have information to the same quality of education. If we do not have the same access, we do not have the same rights as citizens in order to express ourselves or vote or make decisions. That is one of the underlying things for all of the different topics at the session today. It certainly is crucial when we are talking about climate change, engaging young leaders, and basically having a fundamental hope for the future.

Lowell Clare, MA, MLA (Independent Researcher):

LC: I took some notes – something that I underlined is how important it is to democratize visions of the future and how important it is to create opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds to be able to imagine themselves or place themselves in the future. Because when we talk about educating people and bringing more stakeholders into the process of organized global climate action, it is not just about capturing the attention of people in the present, it is about capturing and channelling their empathy for people in the future. A really great way to do that is by bringing futures literacy or bringing future thinking into the classroom and even into the professional sphere. But really, my background as a designer has taught me how important it is to be able to show people what you are talking about. A lot of what you do as a designer – you show people the future because most people are not able to see something that does not exist yet. So when we talk about how to empower not just students, but people generally – and to get them to engage with some very complicated, very big picture thinking that addresses topics at these really enormous scales that most people are just not comfortable thinking in or dealing with – pictures, infographics, visualizations diagrams, these are all tools that can really help us to broaden the conversation. It is not just creating those images and showing them to people, but bringing as many people from around the world as possible into the generation of those images. Because I think it is so important that everybody, like I said, everybody has the opportunity to see themselves in the future.