Today’s young people are uniquely vulnerable to the climate crisis. They are the first generation to grow up in a world where they are faced with tangible impacts of global warming, such as heatwaves, floods, and droughts. While young people are not responsible for climate change, many see themselves as part of the solution.
Adolescents, in particular, have the potential to be at the forefront of the large-scale sustainable change that the world needs. As a group, adolescents are concerned about climate change, driven to make positive contributions to society, and able to make lifestyle changes with apparent ease. And yet, this does not mean that most adolescents consistently act on their concerns in their everyday lives. In fact, research has revealed an “adolescent dip” in sustainable behaviour (e.g. sustainable consumption, energy conservation). What explains this paradox? What can be done to help unleash adolescents’ potential for sustainable engagement?
We argue that adolescents often fail to construe sustainable engagement as relevant to what they care deeply about in their everyday lives—in particular, their enhanced desires to feel autonomous and gain status among their peers. As such, they often lack a sense of urgency to act on their climate concerns. This proposition does not imply a status quo, however. Instead, it offers unique opportunity to foster adolescents’ internal motivation for sustainable engagement.
In the GREENTEENS project, we develop and scrutinize the sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis to understand and discover new ways to promote adolescents’ sustainable engagement. To establish generalizability and facilitate international applicability, we do so in adolescents from three countries: the Netherlands, China, and Colombia. We also test a potential boundary to sustainability motive-alignment—i.e. climate skepticism, or the tendency for subsets of adolescents to doubt if climate change is real, impactful, or caused by human behaviour.
The overall objectives of GREENTEENS are to test:
(1) How the development of adolescents’ sustainable engagement is predicted by their construal of such engagement as being aligned with their motives for autonomy and peer status (i.e. motive-alignment).
(2) How the effects of policies to promote adolescents’ sustainable engagement depend on how whether they harness, or work against, these motives.
(3) When and why climate skepticism develops in adolescents, how it influences motive-alignment, and how it can be prevented.
