Climate change projects and youth engagement: Empowerment and contested knowledge.

This study investigated youths’ empowerment through EU-funded climate change projects (CCPs) and the role that social research and public engagement through environmental education have in that process. The importance of considering youth empowerment in a time of climate change is increasingly recognised. Youths are exposed to interrelated health, social, economic, and political vulnerabilities caused by climate change, but they often have limited resources to address and navigate these changes. To help address these issues youth empowerment holds the potential to give youth a greater influence over their life in the context of evolving climate change. EU-funded CCPs play a crucial role in EU’s climate mitigation and adaptation policies, while the implementation of these projects can have widespread implications for youth across the EU. However, despite this, there is little research that explores the local youth implications of EU-funded CCPs and how they engage with such projects. In this paper, we begin addressing this knowledge gap by exploring how youth empowerment was facilitated, shaped, and restrained over a year-long collaboration with 15-year-old school students in Greece. This collaboration was within the context of an EU Horizon 2020 project on social acceptance of Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCUS) technologies. This school engagement was based on a series of workshops, including a role-playing game and a session of a PlayDecide game on climate change. The findings indicate that the activities provided the students with opportunities to explore and express different types of concerns, knowledges and perspectives on issues related to climate change, social acceptance and CCUS technologies. However, the empowering potential of these activities was also shaped by power differentials and contestations around what types of knowledge matter and the source of that knowledge.