Convened by Petra Dannecker and Fahima Al Farabi, Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna, Austria

Climate change is witnessed and experienced especially by young people all over the world leading to new forms of environment activism and climate justice movements with youth at the forefront.  These movements were and are engaged on the UN level and since the late 2019s increasingly on national, regional and local levels worldwide demanding climate justice. Recently, however, there has been a backlash against climate change as well as discussions and debates about climate justice. They are being discussed less in public, are disappearing from political agendas, or climate change is being confronted with climate skepticism. Against this backdrop the main aim of the panel is to discuss what understanding of climate justice young people have globally and whether the understanding of climate justice has changed against these new developments. The questions we would like to address are: How do youth experience climate crisis? Can the intertwining between climate injustice and social and political problems within the respective local contexts be observed? Which differences exist globally? How do local experiences shape the understanding of climate justice? Have aspirations and future visions changed? What ‘new’ tools, strategies and solutions can be observed within diverse contexts to foster structural changes e.g.? Are global, ‘North-South’, national or local entanglements used in their struggle for climate justice? With these questions we would like to encourage scholars and/or activists from different contexts to share their scientific knowledge regarding climate justice. The panel aims to learn from the different cases but also contribute to scientific knowledge production and political debates regarding climate justice. This especially by considering the so-called Global South often been overlooked by science as well as policy makers on different level.

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