Bridging Research and Practice:Young Children’s Agency and Resilience in a Climate Changed World

The World Forum on Early Care and Education conference is held every two years and focuses on issues related to young children, their care and education. The program for the 2024 event in Vancouver, Canada, included a theme about the impact that climate change is having on young children and their families. The invitation to present on this theme was accepted by a number of practitioners, researchers and policy makers from a range of countries and resulted in several sessions throughout the four days of the conference, discussing and presenting research, practice and pedagogy for supporting young children and their families to adapt to and develop resilience in the face of climate change. The coming together of so many early childhood professionals with an interest in this topic also resulted in the inauguration of an International Working Group on Young Children’s Resilience and Agency in the face of climate change. This paper reports on one of the conference sessions: #62 where early childhood educators, researchers, and managers came together to hear the presentations and to share their own perspectives in the discussion that followed.