Scientific evidence unequivocally shows that human activity is warming the planet and that without drastic efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts on societies around the world will be catastrophic, including extreme weather, famine and rapid biodiversity loss (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC, 2021). In 2015, 196 countries signed up to the Paris Agreement that set out a clear goal to limit global warming to 2°C, and preferably 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2022). However evidence shows current actions are neither sufficient or rapid enough as we head dangerously close to surpassing 1.5°C of warming (IPCC, 2021), leading the UN Secretary-General to label this “a code red for humanity” (UN, 2021).

The climate crisis is underpinned by injustice. This injustice is at least three-fold. Those least responsible for the climate crisis are often most at risk of its impacts, whilst having the fewest resources to make the required adaptations whilst also having the least power to make the necessary systemic changes in hierarchically and generationally ordered societies (Islam and Winkel, 2017; UNICEF, 2015). This injustice includes children and young people and is both between and within countries, with poorer nations and communities, along with Indigenous peoples, particularly at risk (Givens et al., 2019). Issues of inequality and poverty are also compounded by, and intersect with, social categories and identities such as ethnicity, age, social class and gender (Pellow, 2016).

As we navigate through a changing and increasingly unpredictable world, the importance of education cannot be underestimated. The importance of learning with as well as learning from diverse community perspectives, especially those already facing the injustices, of the climate crisis also becomes central in understanding how we mitigate against and adapt to this new world. This is made all the more pertinent by the widespread disconnect amongst many citizens where even those with an awareness of climate change are often likely to feel that its impacts are happening to somebody else and in a distant future (McAdam, 2017).

This paper presents important insights from an international research collaboration using participatory action research along the Red River in Northern Vietnam. Here, climate change is significantly impacting on the lives and livelihoods of its citizens through a number of hydrological extremities including droughts, landslides due to heavy rains and enhanced soil erosion upstream, flooding in mid-stream and rising sea levels, sinking land and accelerating saltwater intrusion in downstream. The project supported youth to both learn about climate change and to become researchers in their own communities. This provided youth with an opportunity to engage in climate action utilising an approach underpinned by Freire’s understanding of praxis, that is ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire, 2005: 51). In particular, youth were encouraged to seek out stories of ‘action’ over issues (De Meyer et al., 2021) through critical dialogue, that is people adapting to living with climate change thus recognising that diverse people’s lived experiences are an important asset (Freire, 1970). Youth were then supported to develop creative ways to share these stories this with both their own and other communities. The focus on youth action is particularly important because it equips youth with a sense of agency and ‘hope’ that can help support youth in dealing with climate anxiety (Hickman et al., 2021). As Freire argues in the Pedagogy of Hope, ‘hopelessness and despair are both the consequences and the cause of inaction and immobilism’ (Freire, 2004: 3) and with that, seeking out these opportunities for hope is one of most important tasks for the progressive educator.

Using a youth-focused participatory action research approach (Thew et al., 2022; Cahill and Dadvand, 2018), the project worked with 18 youths (ages 15 to 30) from the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union in Vietnam. The 18 participants were selected from over 370 applicants, and came from diverse socio-economic, educational, and cultural backgrounds. The youths came from and worked in three distinct provinces (in teams of six), each facing different issues relating to hydrological extremes exacerbated by climate change along the Red River. Youth focused on the following core questions within their communities: What impact is climate change having on these diverse regions/communities? What are people doing (or not doing) to mitigate and adapt to these climate change impacts? To facilitate this, youth engaged in a programme of group activities and workshops aimed at supporting their knowledge of climate change and the development of research skills including engaging in empathy mapping activities to identify and be sensitised to community stakeholders. Equipped with this, youth drew upon community-based intergenerational and indigenous knowledges, by engaging in critical dialogue through qualitative methods, including informal interviews and focus groups, as well as citizen inquiry approaches. The youth were then supported by the interdisciplinary research team (containing social and natural scientists and applied arts-based researchers) to understand their research findings before identifying key climate stories that they would turn into creative outputs for sharing within their communities and beyond (Bloomfield and Manktelow,2021). The stories from the provinces also informed the development of an original water puppetry performance (an important but at-risk cultural art form in the Delta region of the Red River) debuted at showcase and policy exchange event at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi in December 2022. Such an approach as utilised throughout is always developmental as it learns from the young people we work with and this informs our future action as we engage in ongoing praxis (Freire, 1970) and ‘an internal loop’ (Trajber et al., 2019: 91) reflecting backwards and forwards including previous and simultaneous projects focused on climate action with youth. The project also included an international Youth Advisory Board made up of youth engaged in climate/environmental social action who advised both the project team and the youth engaged in the project throughout.

The project has highlighted the importance of education and learning as we navigate the uncertain futures brought about by climate change. The project has demonstrated the significant role of youth in contributing towards community resilience in climate change mitigations and adaptations, both as researchers and communicators of diverse intergenerational and intercultural perspectives. In addition to youth, the project also demonstrated how other community actors benefited from such an approach. As the project foregrounded lived experience as an asset, community members welcomed and actively engaged with youth to share important stories relating to their own lives/practices. The intergenerational critical dialogue between youth and community members also directly inspired youth/community collaborations to address challenges encountered during the research but independent of the research team thus supporting community climate action. The creative outputs developed directly by the youth (including storybooks, vlogs, cartoon strips, flipbooks) and shared via a digital storymap, along with the water puppetry performance the youth stories inspired have also played a central role as part of the ‘action’ of youth, raising awareness of climate change and its impacts to new and diverse audiences. Engagement with these methods and outputs has already inspired further community action. For instance, the water puppetry troupe have now committed to continuing to perform the performance created specifically for the project. Having only performed traditional stories previously during their long history, the troupe have noted a raised consciousness of climate change and now see raising awareness of the issues and the need to protect the environment as something they see as a duty. The project offers important evidence that participatory, and action-focused research work including using creative storytelling methods with an affective framing to support further climate action is part of a pedagogy of hope (Freire, 1992; Bourn, 2021) that is much needed.

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