Engaging youth in the SDG debate will require more than classroom education — it’s time we saw greater online innovation.
According to UN estimates, there are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world. In terms of the sustainability effort, that’s 1.8 billion people to be harnessed in the fight against climate change; 1.8 billion who are the biggest stakeholders in a future of rising global temperatures, resource scarcity, and extreme weather. Recent school strikes led by Swedish child activist Greta Thunberg have demonstrated that young people can and do engage passionately with these issues, but currently this action is limited to protests and does not occur in tandem with institutional efforts.
Why is this the case? Current sustainability policy debates take the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as their point of departure. It is broad and complex: 17 goals and 169 targets ning everything from poverty and education to global governance, and most of them are conceptually quite out of reach for the average teenager. While it’s important to foster an awareness of global issues, it’s difficult to see how a teenager can aid in the fight to end malaria or strengthen democratic institutions in a faraway country, for example. More effort needs to be made to engage them with the targets that have a direct correlation with their individual choices. Goal number 12 — sustainable development and consumption — is an essential place to start.
The contribution of lifestyle habits to CO2 emissions is huge. Households consume 29% of global energy, while the food sector is estimated to account for 30%. Tourism, under the umbrella of which transport, shopping and food are big contributors, accounts for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The US and China are the top 2 biggest producers of CO2 emissions in the world, with totals of 9,040.74 and 4,997.50 million metric tons respectively in 2015. In terms of per capita emissions, the US is ahead of China by 8.94 million metric tons. They are also the two biggest consumer markets in the world, and in the US estimates suggest that over 60% of emissions are directly related to consumer choices. According to the annual EPA report on greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest polluting sector in the US is the transportation industry, responsible for 29% emissions in 2017. The commercial and residential sector comes in at 12%. Despite this, only 53% of Americans think that climate change is caused by human actions, a myth that clearly needs to be dispelled.
We are not born consumers. Consumers are formed by the influence of media and marketing that instills in us a desire for cars, holidays and electronics from a young age. Generation Z (individuals born 1995 onwards) will represent 40% of global consumers by 2020, meaning that it is our youth whose consumption habits need to change now if the world has any hope of mitigating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions and meeting global reduction targets.
Policy makers are aware of this. In the US, school science curricula standards mandate climate change education in the classroom. But even if this is effectively implemented, the reality is that we no longer live in a world where teenagers gain the majority of their information from teachers. The average American teenager goes to school for 6.5 hours, 180 days a year. Factoring in breaks, the actual time spent sitting in class is much lower. In comparison, according to recent statistics, teens spend an average of 6.5 hours daily using screen-based entertainment media like online video or music — that’s more than a quarter of their day. Including weekends and holidays, this is considerably more time spent consuming online media than in official education. Even if 100% of the average of 4 hours a week that these teenagers spend in a science classroom were focused on environmental issues (which it isn’t), that would still be 37.5 more hours per week spent consuming media that deliver messages of the opposite kind — that long-distance air travel to exotic locations is desirable; that successful adults own a Mercedes; that the release of the new iPhone will render the current model obsolete.
In order to capture teenage attention, it is therefore clear that the conversation has to move outside of the classroom, to the apps and websites that they are already using. According to the Pew Research Centre, over 90% of US teens use social media, with the most popular platforms being YouTube (82%) and Instagram (72%). The UN and its associated bodies are well aware of the potential for these platforms, and there have been various social media campaigns created since 2015 to promote youth engagement with the SDGs, particularly on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. But the question remains as to how effective these campaigns have actually been in translating sustainability messages to concrete actions amongst the youth, and particularly teenage, population.
Campaigns such as littlexlittle, in which the UN has partnered with Google, advertising companies, influencers and celebrities to create a YouTube initiative inspiring young people to contribute to the SDG effort, are a step in the right direction. They demonstrate an understanding of the need to include young people in the creation of content aimed to inform them, as well as the importance of delivering the message in a format they can easily access, but comments on the YouTube channel indicate a disconnect between the tone of the campaign and the expectations of a young audience. The decline of Facebook amongst teenagers in favour of apps like Instagram and YouTube suggests that this demographic is much more reliant on visual information than previous generations. They are not using Instagram for infographics and statistics, which seems to be the go-to for some of the UN-backed pages (example @theglobalgoals). Instead, this information needs to be incorporated into a form of visual storytelling that retains a unique aesthetic value in order to capture attention online. Those accounts that can successfully strike a balance between delivering on artistic originality, authenticity and narrative consistency are the ones that amass followers into the thousands. While many of the popular accounts belong to celebrities who practice extremely unsustainable lifestyles, there has also been a steady growth of ‘normal people’ gaining social media popularity for promoting SDG-oriented lifestyles. People like Lauren Singer, for example, whose @trashisfortossers account encouraging zero waste has 344,000 followers. For comparison, the official SDG ‘global goals’ account has 243,000. While her lifestyle is not one that everyone has the economic capacity to replicate, her stories are aesthetically engaging and convey simple messages that easily translate to tangible ways to reduce individual consumption.
With consumer spending in India set to grow from $1.5 billion today to nearly $6 trillion by 2030, it will soon become the 3rd largest consumer market in the world, behind only the US and China. Generation Z, which in India will encompass 370 million people between the ages of 10 and 25 by 2030, will have a huge impact on the nature of household consumption and the direction of spending as more and more people rise out of poverty to join the middle classes. Internet use is also set to grow, with 9 out of 10 Indians over the age of 15 years old predicted to be online, meaning that social media audiences will expand as young people find more ways to connect. India will therefore be a big player in the direction of the global consumer market, and educating youth now will go a long way to ensuring it does not follow in the footsteps of the high-polluting Western countries. But any attempt to capitalise on the vast potential that online platforms have for delivering the sustainable development message straight to teenagers will require more creativity and innovation than has been demonstrated thus far, along with increased collaboration between institutions like the UN, influencers and young people themselves. Social media can and should be used as an educational medium, but the reasons as to why young people use it in the first place cannot be forgotten in the process.
The author is a research intern at ORF New Delhi.
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