Abstract
This chapter provides a review of recent research approaches to understanding young people and climate justice. We identify three major threads in this emerging body of literature. First, research that approaches climate justice as a social practice (Boran, 2018), examines how young people take part in and experience action for climate justice, ranging from everyday individual activism (Börner et al., 2021; Skovdal & Benwell, 2021; Trott, 2021) to social movements (Curnow & Gross, 2016; O’Brien et al., 2018; Piispa & Kiilakoski, 2021) and participation in formalised political processes such as the United Nations Conference of the Parties (Foran et al., 2017; Thew et al., 2020). A second research approach examines how young people learn about climate justice in formal and informal educational settings (Stapleton, 2019, Trott et al., 2020). This developmental thread also recognises that young people can play a role in educating parents and peers (Stapleton, 2019; Biswas, 2021; Biswas & Matthies, 2021; Wildersmeersch et al., 2022). The third research approach is that of Indigenous Knowledge perspectives which challenge the inequitable exposure to climate risk experienced by young people in marginalised youth communities through an Indigenous-led, strengths-based re-framing of the climate crisis (MacKay et al., 2021; Ritchie, 2021; Sherwood O’Regan, 2020). In discussion, we offer a critical assessment of the overall shift in these methodological approaches towards those that are co-designed and which youth-centre young people’s experiences and perspectives (Bowman, 2019), allowing researchers to better understand the nuanced ways that diverse young people understand and engage with climate justice.