Youth-led adaptation to climate change

The YACC project was focused on supporting young people to take climate action in Vietnam, later expanding to work in Thailand and Cambodia. Social science and natural science researchers at universities in the UK and Vietnam worked with young people living in the Red River basin in north Vietnam to understand how climate change was affecting their area, use creative methods to share their learning and act on the issues they encountered.

The project was guided by four principles:

• The importance of young people for sustainable climate action.
• Using participatory action research methods that allowed young people to develop research skills.
• Valuing learning from intergenerational and intercultural exchange, between older and younger generations, between the UK and Vietnam, and between different groups within Vietnam.
• The role of creativity in building climate action and community resilience, which led to the project’s focus on stories and storytelling as a key method.

Project description

Project planning

The project was first planned in 2019 in response to a funding programme on ‘Youth Futures’ by the British Academy. A group of academic partners were brought together at the University of Hull and Vietnam National University’s Central Institute of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies (VNU-CRES) at Hanoi, building upon pre-existing relationships. The team designed the project to engage with creative methods, particularly storytelling, as a useful tool to facilitate dialogue and help people to share their stories. This approach drew on learning from previous work done by the project lead, Professor Lisa Jones, who had done a project with care-experienced young people dealing with alienation through the education system, that involved using filmmaking to help them share their stories. The YACC project aimed to avoid a top-down approach where possible and respond to what young people wanted to do by including youth-led non-academic partners in Vietnam from the start.

‘It had really hit us as a powerful way that young people could creatively tell their stories. But in a way that inspired change in people around them.’

Lisa Jones

With a project start date of 20 March 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic not only delayed but also disrupted the project. Due to the pandemic YACC lost its youth-led and climate-focused partner intended to guide the project team and the youth participants. To respond to the loss and fulfil this important role, the organisers decided to bring together an international youth advisory board of people aged 14-30 involved in climate action in Cambodia, France, India, Senegal, Rwanda, USA, UK and Vietnam. This helped to ensure that the project approach was genuinely designed by and with young people. Although COVID-19 reduced the time available for the project delivery and prevented certain in-person activities from taking place, the organisers felt that they learned a lot from the enforced change, making them more flexible and responsive in their approach.

‘The research is very open which is quite worrying for some funders because actually you’re not coming out with a list of predetermined outcomes at the end.’

Lisa Jones

Project inception

The project’s main activities and fieldwork commenced fully at the start of 2022. The organisers worked with the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union in three areas of the Red River catchment to invite young people to apply to take part in the project. From 370 applications, 60 young people were invited to attend community-based workshops, which led to the selection of the final group of 16 young people across three different locations. The cohort was deliberately chosen to represent diverse economic and cultural backgrounds including ethnicity, education level, climate change knowledge and gender. Each location faced its own specific environmental issues, but all were linked to challenges associated with addressing and adapting to the impacts of climate change. By bringing the three areas together, the organisers aimed to create opportunities to share learning and develop connections.

The project started with a period of knowledge exchange with the communities to understand what they already knew, and what they did and didn’t need. It was clear that people were observing and responding to changes in their environment, but they did not have the language or in some cases understanding to express how these were linked to climate change. The organisers ran workshops and individual training for the young people, focused on developing their knowledge on climate change and research skills like interviewing, focus groups and ethics. Participants then put this training into practice during a visit to Xuân Thủy National Park, where they observed climate change impacts and practiced their research skills by speaking to residents about their experiences of living with climate change.

‘The first part is that knowledge exchange phase where you’re really trying to understand who the young people are, where they live, what their context is, their communities that they’re living in, what they know already, what they don’t know, and then what they need your help with and what they don’t need your help with, so that you work out how you can then support that, but without predetermining.’

Dr Hue Le, Central Institute of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Vietnam National University

Gathering stories

Young people were then supported to go back into their own communities to research how climate change was impacting the lives of people in their area. Much of this process revolved around gathering stories, especially from older people who could remember previous extreme weather events as well as how the area has changed over decades. This process was necessarily messy and uncontrollable with unpredictable emergent outcomes. The themes covered included the impact of extreme weather events, flooding, droughts, erosion and changes to farming practices. Very specific issues were revealed, such as the dangers of water being released from hydroelectric dams without notice during periods of heavy rain. Highly practical advice on how to keep people safe during flooding was also documented. The process was about gathering information, but also normalising conversations about climate change in the community.

‘It’s quite scary for people doing this type of research because sometimes the young people are like, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing and why I’m doing it.” We had to talk a lot about trusting in the process and the process is like: “Actually you do know the answers to this. Actually, it’s your community, you’ll find what it is you’re looking for.”’

Lisa Jones

The young people used these stories to produce creative work like films, storybooks and comic strips – engaging and highly personal ways to share important information captured by these stories. The young people were encouraged to share the stories and creative work with their communities to develop understanding of how to respond to climate change locally and inspire action. This was important for building resilience where external support is not always forthcoming or possible. However, it was clear that many of the issues raised by the stories required input from decisionmakers based elsewhere in Vietnam. The organisers helped to share the creative outputs widely by combining them into a ‘digital storybook’, which can be accessed online, and creating a storymap showing the locations where the different stories came from. These were shared with decisionmakers at a showcase event held at the Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi in December 2022.

‘The storytelling strategy worked exceptionally well, breaking through barriers that had previously existed. When the young people understood that the focus was on their creativity, they developed some truly impressive work.’

Hue Le

As part of the showcase event, the organisers worked with Đồng Ngư Water Puppetry Troupe to design a performance drawing on the stories gathered by young people, which provided a culturally valued, creative and memorable way to share the stories coming out of the project. The puppetry performance was well attended by people in decision-making roles who seemed to be attracted to the creative aspect of the event. These included policymakers from Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development who, after seeing the performance, decided to use water puppetry as a communication tool for their own disaster preparedness programme.

The researchers also worked with a small film studio, My Pockets, to create a short animated film ‘River of Hope’ that described the project in an engaging and accessible way. This was a useful tool for explaining the project aims in a way that was in line with the creative character of the project. The findings from the project were also shared internationally through events like COP28 and COY18, the 18th Conference of Youth, which accompanies annual UN climate talks. The organisers arranged for a youth representative to attend to share their perspectives and the project’s outcomes.

Following the project, the youth participants continue to be more involved in work on climate change in various ways, showing that it had been successful in creating conditions needed for facilitating their empowerment. One youth participant, a primary school teacher, created a picture book based on a story she had collected, which she now uses for teaching children in her school. Members of one of the communities decided to address the issue of waste being dumped in the river. The organisers have developed a new project ‘Advancing Policy and Practice on Climate Action in Southeast Asia’ to apply some of the results from the earlier project. They continue to work with Local Conferences of Youth (LCOYs) in southeast Asia, which provide a method to continue using the stories and creative outputs from the project to influence policy.

‘The experience has been overwhelmingly positive and truly convincing. I can’t envision pursuing any future research that doesn’t incorporate creative outputs. I’m completely committed to this approach now.’

Hue Le

Sustainability issues

‘So all the time you’re learning, if you’re working with different artists or you’re working with an animator and they do something quite different. Every time you partner with somebody, you learn a bit more. It becomes a bit more messy because next time you’re aware of that as well. It kind of extends all the time.’

Lisa Jones

Extreme weather and climate adaptation

Vietnam is experiencing an increase in flooding, landslides and periods of increased droughts, despite having done relatively little to contribute to the causes of climate change. With one of the densest populations in the world, these changes pose massive risks to citizens that need to be addressed. The project helped to research and document climate risks and highlight solutions that are already available.

Supporting and facilitating the conditions for young people to empower themselves

By using creative methods and participatory action research YACC offered young people new routes to act on climate change. Innovative approaches helped young people to co-create ideas for solutions that could influence policymakers and allow their communities to be heard.

Developing community resilience

The project helped to bring together communities across generations to share knowledge and create shared understanding of how to respond to climate impacts. Participants developed practical skills and knowledge of climate change, and the project led to intangible benefits by helping to build confidence and belief that people could make a difference.

Influencing policy and decision making

Creative methods were an effective way of sharing perspectives of communities, with people making policy decisions that affect them. The project created opportunities for disempowered people to be heard by decisionmakers, presenting personal stories that aimed to build empathy and provoke action in a way that statistics would not.

Climate change communication

The project encouraged cultural organisations that participated to use their platform to engage with climate change. Both the Museum of Ethnology and Đồng Ngư Water Puppetry Troupe have committed to taking on climate themes in their ongoing work.

Lessons, tips and advice

• Participatory research is necessarily messy and requires being able to completely change the direction in response to what participants need. This allows for new and unexpected benefits to emerge. Mess can be evidence that people have empowered themselves to take initiative rather than being told what to do.

‘Being prepared to change what you’re doing, being prepared to listen and being prepared to change direction, accepting that it can be a bit messy but that messiness is not a problem. It’s not something to necessarily be apologised for.’

Lisa Jones

• The team highlighted the importance of emotion both as an inhibitor and facilitator of action on climate. Climate change projects can use creative methods to help people express and deal with their feelings around climate, and that ‘hope’ is important for action.
• The project aimed to avoid a top-down approach and be fully responsive to the needs of the young people involved in it. As such, there was no list of pre-determined outputs, which could be tricky for getting support from some funders and bringing in partners who wanted clear agreements about deliverables.
• Although the project was process led, having a showcase at the end was important for being able to engage policymakers who expected findings to be shared in this kind of format. The showcase also provided an end point to help participants understand and enjoy everything they had achieved.

• Relationship building was extremely important. It took time to develop trust and understanding of each other’s needs and get to know what would be most useful for participants.
• Communication barriers and cultural differences can cause issues. When the organisers asked participants to ‘reflect’ on what they had done, this tended to get translated as more like ‘self-criticism’, which participants were reluctant to do. The organisers were advised that communication norms in Vietnam tend to encourage positivity over critique, and they had to find an alternative way to express what they wanted people to do.
• The team are clear this type of international research would never be possible without extensive collaborations and partnership working.

Partners and stakeholders

• The project was run by staff at the universities of Hull, Loughborough, Newcastle and Vietnam National University. The project lead was Lisa Jones at the University of Hull. She worked with co-researchers including Katie Parsons and Dan Parsons (formerly University of Hull and now Loughborough University), Hue Le and Thu Thi Vo (CRES-VNU – Central Institute of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Vietnam National University), Florence Halstead (formerly of University of Hull now at University of Glasgow), Chris Hackney (Formerly University of Hull and now Newcastle University), Alison Lloyd Williams (formerly at University of Hull, now at Lancaster University) and Anh Nguyen also at CRES-VNU.
• The project organisers worked with an international Youth Advisory Board comprising young people aged 14-30 years who are involved in climate action from across the world. The board was set up to advise the project team and ensure that the approach was shaped clearly with the needs of young people in mind.
• The Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union is a Vietnam-wide young people’s union that the project organisers worked with to find local young people to work with on the project.
• The Institute of Cultural Studies is a Vietnamese research institution that connected the researchers with cultural bodies in Vietnam, including the water puppetry group.
• The organisers worked with Đồng Ngư Water Puppetry Troupe, who created a new performance based on the stories collected through the project and performed it at the Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi.

• Yorkshire-based film production company and arts organisation My Pockets helped to produce the animated film ‘River of Hope’ about the project.
• The organisers worked with the Youth Advisory Board and their connections through YOUNGO, the official youth constituency at United Nations climate talks, to engage with the Local Conferences of Youth (LCOYs) in Cambodia and Thailand, and to bring findings from the project to COP28 and the COY18 youth climate conference in Dubai in 2023.

Funding

The initial project costs reached £297,000. The project was funded by the British Academy’s Youth Futures Programme and supported under the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund.

Funding covered researcher time on the project as well as two research assistants who worked full time during 2022, all international and Vietnam-based travel as well as the development of the creative outputs and the showcase event.

The follow-on project, ‘Advancing Policy and Practice on Climate Action in SouthEast Asia’ (APPOCA), is supported by the British Academy’s Maximising Impact Programme, funded by the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Funding for this reached £47,000 and enabled the team to extend the impact and its reach in Vietnam, as well and to Cambodia and Thailand.

Relevant links

• ‘Creative approaches essential to drive youth-led climate action in countries most-impacted by climate change’ article
• ‘Act of hope: a story of climate change and water puppetry performance along the Red River, Vietnam’ case study
• Creative outputs on the Younity4Action website
• ‘Youth-led Adaptation for climate change challenges in Vietnam: social action, inter-generational and inter-cultural learning’ project on the University of Hull website