Tom Youngman

Talking sustainability with 10 year olds

I attended Frome Sustainability Conference with Green Vision on Friday. We were expecting to be presenting to 14 - 17 year olds but arrived to discover it was a somewhat younger audience.

It was an experience unto itself, really. How clued up they were was impressive - climate change is now taught at school from a very young age - but they hadn’t quite got the grasp of how it all ties together. They understood that greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels heat up the earth, they understood that they had to save energy - but they couldn’t quite explain how the two linked together.

I always find it interesting to get perspectives from very young children on this - when pursuing issues with such a grounding in intergenerational equity, we are all in some way attempting to speak up for those younger than us and those not yet born.

When writing the report with DECC’s Youth Advisory Panel I asked for quotations from 6 - 10 year olds on their perceptions of the planet and their future. Jade, aged 7, said: “if people keep using electricity it is going to melt the ice at the North Pole and it’s going to flood’. Sam, also aged 7, said “I’m scared because the air might be polluted”. Isabel, aged 8, said: “Climate change might make our planet like Mars”.

Even if their technical understanding is lacking, the emotional understanding these children have is spot on. My favourite of the quotations was from a 6 year-old in Brighton: “In the future everyone will be friendly.” The ‘adult’ world of today could do well to seek guidance from the basic moral values of its offspring.

The full set of quotations can be found in the introduction to the DECC Youth Advisory Panel’s report: ‘Energy: How fair is it anyway?’