Young climate activists in Cyprus challenge adult notions of the pandemic as exceptional, by drawing attention to the everydayness and continuity of the climate crisis. At the same time, they retain hope, rooted in their willingness and capacity to act collectively to bring about change.
Spyros Spyrou
I started following Youth for Climate Cyprus (the group which later became the focus of our study – from now on referred to as Y4C) early in 2019 when they began organizing their first public protests in Cyprus. It was a small group of young climate activists who wanted to join in and contribute to the international Fridays for Future movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg.
Their engagement with climate change offered an opportunity to see and understand what happens on the ground when young people from a politically divided society (whose political imaginations are often constrained by the island’s political and territorial division) engage in self-organizing with a political cause like climate change which is at one and the same time both local and global.
Together with my colleagues, Eleni Theodorou and Georgina Christou, and following a successful bid for a small grant, we set out in January 2020 to study Y4C. We wanted to understand how these young people made sense of their activism, how they organized and networked in their activist work as well as how they chose to perform their activism. Our approach was designed to be mainly ethnographic including participant observation, in-depth individual interviews and focus group discussions though it also included textual analysis of social media posts and local media coverage of youth climate activism.
Despite our more conventional ethnographic approach which assumed physical interaction and participation in the group’s activities, we quickly moved to make adjustments given the COVID 19 lockdown we had in Cyprus by the middle of March 2020. Access to technology by the young activists allowed us to continue our research with them online and be creative capitalizing on the unfolding and unprecedented historical circumstances of the pandemic we were all facing.
In our discussions with the young climate activists we were able to learn about their own trajectories as activists and the factors that motivated their activism. We also learned quite a bit about their efforts to self-organize as a grassroots movement in a more horizontal way that avoided hierarchical structures, their preferred strategies for climate action and for gaining legitimacy as a social movement in Cyprus, and their use of social media to enhance their political presence and voice.
Their views on climate change reflected a critical understanding of the complex factors that contributed to the climate crisis, highlighting the role of humans while also situating their analysis within the historical context of capitalist development and the effects of overproduction and overconsumption on the environment (see Theodorou, Spyrou, Christou 2021).
In Christou, Theodorou, and Spyrou (2022), we explore more deeply how the young climate activists from Y4C frame their understanding of the climate crisis from the vantage point of the pandemic. Rather than seeing the pandemic as an unprecedented event, they see it more as an outcome of capitalism which manifests itself as a type of ‘slow pandemic’. By doing so, we argue, they challenge adult notions of the pandemic as exceptional to draw attention to the everydayness and continuity of the climate crisis.
Yet, despite their clearly stated diagnosis of the problem, the young climate activists also retained a critical sense of hope rooted in their own willingness and capacity to act collectively to bring about change. For many, this was a practical means for overcoming the fear, uncertainty and anxiety that they often experienced in their assessment of the future. As social movement activists, they wanted to be recognized as legitimate political subjects with the right to act as future-makers. However, this is not a naïve call by young people to be seen as the sole makers of the future. It is rather a call for intergenerational solidarity and collaboration as the only effective means for tackling the climate crisis.
This recognition that there is a new ethos emerging among current generations of young activists which is inclusive and collaborative, highlights the need for more research which explores such instances of collaboration and solidarity. Relatedly, it highlights the need to pay closer attention to how the politics of intergenerational relations are reconstituted in the 21st century in the public arenas of social struggle.
Acknowledgements: The study was funded by the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the Hellenic Observatory at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.
References Cited