Young People’s Climate Change Engagement in Tanzania (Y-ENGAGE)

University of Copenhagen

Morten Skovdal, Associate Professor
Emmanuel Raju, Associate Professor
Maria Marti Castaner, Assistant Professor
Claudia Bagge-Petersen, Postdoc

University of Dar es Salaam

Catherine A. Masao, Lecturer
Emma Teresa Liwenga, Senior Lecturer
Edmund Mabhuye, Lecturer
Joel Nobert, Senior Lecturer

Ardhi University

Tatu Limbumba, Senior Research Fellow
Carolyne Ignatius Nombo, Associate Professor
Conrad John Masabo, PhD Student

Tanzania Youth Coalition

Lenin Kazobo, Director
Joyce Rupia, Youth and Child Participation Consultant

Save the Children

Jane Mbagi Mutua, PDQ Director (Save the Children Tanzania)
George Neville, Trends and Research Advisor (Save the Children Denmark)

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity, and a defining issue of our time. Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing an intensification of risks arising from climate change, such as warming, more intense and prolonged droughts, as well as more flooding, affecting food security and livelihoods with devastating impacts on health and education. Children and youth are at the receiving end of climate change. Not only will they experience increased water stress, food insecurity and poverty, they are also most at risk of suffering the health effects of climate-sensitive diseases, and to experience climate-related anxieties.

Through photography-focused participatory action research in four diverse settings of Tanzania, Y-ENGAGE aims to empirically explore:

1. young people’s experiences, conceptions, struggles, and ways of coping with climate change;
2. opportunities and challenges for young people to exert influence and transform climate-related practices;
3. the role of teachers and schools in facilitating engagement with climate change; and
4. the role of school-based dialogical approaches in instigating young people’s engagement with climate change.

Through strategic comparisons of this empirical work, Y-ENGAGE further aims to generate understandings of how patterns of daily life shape young people’s climate change engagement and to co-construct theories and practical models for engaging young people in locally relevant and empowering climate actions. Y-ENGAGE also examines the transformative potential and socio-ethical dilemmas of inviting young people to study their own engagement with climate change through photography.

Emdal Navne, D & Skovdal, M 2021, ''Small steps and small wins' in young people’s everyday climate crisis activism', Children's Geographies, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 309-316.

Skovdal, M., & Benwell, M. C. (2021). Young people's everyday climate crisis activism: new terrains for research, analysis and action. Children's Geographies, 19(3), 259-266.