Children of the Millennium Children - 2050 Future
Perhaps the most concerning thing about the year 2050 is how soon it will be here. It is not impossible that I might see it, though unlikely (I would be 97). However my children will have reached the retirement age I am now, and their children will be in their late thirties and forties. In that sense, 2050 is part of “the present”. In 1992, the prospect of the millennium children reaching their forties somehow seemed far in “the future” but with the wisdom of hindsight, it was not. In 1992, the focus was on stopping or at least mitigating climate change, later to crystalise as the 1.5 degrees target. That is already missed and talk of mitigation, at least in the way we saw it in 1992, is now history. 2050 will be all about living with the consequences. Antonio Gutterres has implied a dystopian vision, “climate hell”. That, of course, is a subjective judgement and dystopianism never did anybody any good. Whatever this “hell” turns out to be the "Three Rs" of Recovery, Resilience and Reconstruction are likely to loom large. The defining educational task of the late 2020s is, or should be, to prepare children for these.
Where once there was a frozen pole
Resilience, Recovery and Reconstruction
What image of the year 2050 do children alive today have? The natural state of young children is one of optimism, hyper-optimism in the youngest, but this tends to decline into adolescence because negative experiences register more strongly than positive ones. This is not a new phenomenon. However, a recent (2021) large, global study confirms other findings that once optimistic perceptions of the future are shifting from promise to uncertainty and threat. As far as children are concerned, we can at the present time identify two groups, those who have already experienced a climate related disaster, and those who have yet to experience it. It is through those that have already experienced it that the 3Rs (Resilience, Recovery and Reconstruction) have arisen. For the children who have experienced disaster, the 3Rs define both present and future. For all others recovery and reconstruction will be in “the future”, but what about resilience, should we be teaching that to children now? And should we still be teaching mitigation in the hope that calamitous tipping points can still be avoided? Might today’s young people sense a little hypocrisy here?
Listening and taking concerns seriously - the first step to resilience
We are going to have to talk to children. For the first quarter century of the new millennium, I avoided doing that because dystopian environmentalism received a very bad press during the 1990s. Children, I thought, should at least have a happy and carefree childhood for as long as that can last into adolescence. Such a position is no longer tenable if it ever was. Research is now showing that children and adolescents are beginning to suffer from growing and potentially damaging levels of anxiety and distress about what they imagine coming decades hold for them. The immediate cause of this distress is not being listened to and not having their concerns taken seriously by those close to them. The perception of insufficient action by governments also figured prominently, particularly in non-democratic regimes and in the poorer nations of the global south.
Learning from adolescents who already live further down the highway to hell
Living in the UK, a country that has so far experienced only a small number of relatively minor floods, wildfires and heat events, it is easy to forget that climate change must be seen and treated as a global phenomenon. Children and adolescents in parts of Canada, for example, have already experienced what some adolescents in the UK fear. Much has been learned from major wildfire events in Alberta which has experienced new, unprecedented, repeated and catastrophically destructive wildfire events over large areas for more than a decade. Although these events have shown recovery and reconstruction in action, they have also shown that the impact of climate change on youth health and welfare is serious, significant and potentially long-lasting.
By way of contrast, it is reported that adolescents living in the slums of Surat city in Gujarat do not debate or express anxiety about climate change. They live with it. They cope whenever floods engulf their houses, they take steps to protect themselves from the flood associated diseases of Malaria and Leptospirosis and they observe how their communities cope with regular economic and infrastructure damage. They have learned to link almost every concern with health, take responsibility for their own health and define it not merely as absence of illness but in terms of coping with the afflictions that beset them from their environment. Is there anything to be learned from youth living in such circumstances?
