TakingITGlobal

The recognition of smog as an experience of climate change is not a misunderstanding of what climate change is. Rather, team members recognize that smog and climate change both arise from the burning of fossil fuels, both threaten public health by changing the atmosphere, and both are predicted to become worse if fossil fuel use continues (Perera, 2017). In fact, air pollution has been closely linked to decreased cognitive performance (Zhang et al. 2018), increased suicide risk (Casas et al. 2017), increased psychiatric disorders (Oudin et al. 2016), and approximately 3.3 million premature deaths per year worldwide (Lelieveld et al. 2015). Children are particularly vulnerable to poor air quality (Oudin et al. 2016), and more than 95% of the world's population breathes unsafe air (HEI, 2018). A few youth reported indirect experiences of climate change through exposure to discussions about certain industries that are disrupting the climate, but are nonetheless key to local economies. In Alberta, Canada, team members from Calgary and Edmonton were keenly aware of the politically contentious tar sands operations in the province, and the link between fossil fuel extraction, boreal forest degradation, and increased atmospheric CO2. A team member from Jakarta identified rainforest logging as a climate change experience, because logging interferes with the rainforest ecosystem's ability to both absorb CO2 and protect Indonesia from rising sea-levels. Team members from Ghana, Kenya, Colombia, and Brazil linked the destruction of local forests and wetlands with climate change for similar reasons. Research by Steffen et al. (2018) supports team members' more expansive understanding of climate change by explaining that the dominant climate change narrative is flawed because it casts humans as an external force driving change in a linear way: more greenhouse gases equals higher average global temperature. They argue that we need to recast our understanding of climate change to include ourselves in a complex earth system, the stability of which is increasingly imbalanced by destroying ecosystems, such as wetlands and forests, which provide global resilience by regulating climate and storing carbon. 26 | F I N D I N G S

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