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Perspectives of UK adolescents on the youth climate strikes

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Abstract

The school climate-strike movement has become a powerful force, shaping how people engage with climate change. Here we use a qualitative interview methodology to give voice to adolescents in the United Kingdom. We show how our participants—strikers and non-strikers alike—were united in framing climate change as an issue of intergenerational injustice, suggesting they may share one of the conditions for a politicized collective identity.

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Fig. 1: Diagrammatic representation of striker status, topics of consensus and divergence.

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Data availability

Data availability is subject to controlled access. Participants in this study consented to their data being stored securely at University of Bath and then destroyed. They did not consent to their data being shared.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the 22 participants who took part in this research. The research was funded by an ESRC studentship awarded to K.L., grant number ES/J50015X/1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Katharine Lee, Leda Blackwood & Julie Barnett

  2. Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Saffron O’Neill

Authors
  1. Katharine Lee
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  2. Saffron O’Neill
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  3. Leda Blackwood
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  4. Julie Barnett
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Contributions

K.L. designed the study, conducted the interviews, analysed the data and drafted the paper. S.O., L.B. and J.B. contributed to the data analysis and reviewed and revised the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Katharine Lee.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Sohana Nasrin, Séamus Power and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 2 and interview schedules.

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Lee, K., O’Neill, S., Blackwood, L. et al. Perspectives of UK adolescents on the youth climate strikes. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 528–531 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01361-1

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