If today’s young people are tomorrow’s leaders, they will inherit not only the world’s problems but also the tools and ideas to solve them. One of the biggest changes they will face is a changing climate. This means hotter days, more intense storms and floods, longer droughts, and big changes in where and when rain falls.
Youth need to be actively involved now in deciding how their cities will prepare for these changes.
We are climate adaptation researchers and university professors who study how communities can prepare for floods, heatwaves and displacement. Together with our co-author, Bashiru Koroma, president of Keep Africa Beautiful Sierra Leone (a youth-led civil society climate organisation) in Bo City, Sierra Leone, we set out to discover whether a youth-centred, community-based Climate Science Hub could build the knowledge, skills, leadership, networks and adaptive capacity needed for young people in a secondary African city to cope with climate change.
