Editor’s note: Climate change is shaping the lives of young people everywhere on Earth. So Climate Cardinals, a youth-led translation and empowerment organization, invited 15- to 19-year-olds from around the world to share their experiences with climate change, storytelling, and resilience in an essay contest. From more than 360 submissions from 62 countries, Climate Cardinals and Yale Climate Connections chose the following five essays to feature.
Read on for perspectives from Argentina, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, the United States, and Uzbekistan. You can also click the links below to jump to the start of each story.
- When the rain forgets its way by Khurshiddinov Timur from Tashkent, Uzbekistan
- Walking through dust and rain by Yasser Arafat Amidu from Yaoundé, Cameroon
- Stealing the microphone by Paz María Juárez from Córdoba, Argentina
- We tell stories to survive by David Beckham Unaegbu from Houston, USA
- Turning science into stories for all by Talibzada Matanat from Baku, Azerbaijan
When the rain forgets its way
By Khurshiddinov Timur (17 years old) – Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1st place)
I was 12 when my grandmother told me the story of the rain that forgot. In her voice – cracked by time, charged with thunder – she spoke of a sky once loyal to the Earth: how rains visited the fields like letters from the heavens. But then came the factories, the smoke, the forgetting.
The rain lost its way.
I didn’t realize it then, but that tale was my first lesson in climate change. In my hometown in Uzbekistan, textbooks speak of CO2 levels, polar ice, and greenhouse effects. But they don’t speak our language. They don’t speak to the boy who believes the lake is alive, or the farmer who still leaves offerings for the wind. Scientific facts exist – but they often float, untethered from the lives of those they’re meant to move.
That’s where storytelling steps in.
Across the globe, storytelling is being reimagined not as decoration, but as climate infrastructure. In Bolivia, elders embed conservation in Quechua oral narratives. In the Pacific islands, chants preserve ecological knowledge as cultural inheritance. In Uzbekistan, too, folk legends once carried climate memory – about winds with tempers and rivers with voices. These aren’t just tales. They are maps – cognitive, emotional, and moral.
In 2023, I joined a local climate education club. We were supposed to teach environmental science in rural schools. At first, we used PowerPoint slides and diagrams. Blank stares. Then I remembered my grandmother’s rain. I told her story – and suddenly, the room leaned in. Students asked questions. Some shared their own myths about talking mountains or the snow that remembers. It wasn’t about belief. It was about belonging. So we created Project Echo Uzbekistan: a youth-led initiative where students collect climate-relevant folk stories from their grandparents, analyze their messages, and retell them using modern media – comics, short films, podcasts.
One group turned a drought myth from Samarkand, a city in southeastern Uzbekistan, into a stop-motion animation about solar energy. Another turned a grandmother’s tale of a jealous fire spirit into a podcast on deforestation. Through this, students weren’t just hearing stories – they were making them, owning the narrative of climate change.
But storytelling isn’t automatically virtuous. It can also mislead – climate denial thrives on compelling false narratives. That’s why we pair storytelling with science and media literacy. Every tale is followed by a “myth + method” explanation. The rain that forgot? It’s paired with a breakdown of atmospheric circulation and land degradation in Central Asia. Myth becomes a doorway – not a detour – to scientific truth.
This model does more than educate; it heals. In places where climate change feels distant or too technical, stories create bridges. They speak of loss in a way numbers can’t. They localize the global. And in a world where climate fatigue is real, stories remind us why we care.
Is this scalable? Maybe not in the conventional sense. But change can be quiet. A student who asks their grandmother about the “old weather.” A teacher who assigns folk myths alongside climate graphs. A Telegram group that shares stories with carbon facts. These are the seeds.
Now whenever I visit a new place in Uzbekistan – a village, a bazaar, a hillside farm – I ask not just, “What is your climate data?” but “What is your climate story?” I’ve learned that solutions don’t only live in science labs or ministries. Sometimes, they live in lullabies. Sometimes, they’re passed from wrinkled hands over a cup of green tea.
Climate change may be a crisis of carbon, but it is also a crisis of disconnection – from nature, from each other, from the stories that once rooted us. By reviving those stories – and adapting them with care – my generation isn’t just educating, we’re remembering. And maybe, helping the rain find its way back home.
Walking through dust and rain
By Yasser Arafat Amidu (18 years old)– Yaoundé, Cameroon (2nd place)
Climate change is more than rising temperatures or shifting rainfall; it is a human story written in dust, cold mornings, and drying rivers. In my village of Njanawa, Cameroon, it shapes how we learn, how we survive, and how we fight back.
The dry season, once lasting three months, now stretches to nearly four and a half months, bringing scorching dust, water scarcity, and harsh living conditions. The rainy season, in turn, delivers heavy downpours and violent winds that damage homes, crops, and schools. In response, our community has turned to education, both formal and informal, as a tool to adapt, build resilience, and empower youth leadership.
During the dry season, attending school was physically and mentally demanding. My former school, G.S. Mbiame, commonly known as Jaanah, was more than an hour and a half away on foot. Mornings were freezing, and I often had no proper school pullover, wearing instead one of my mother’s oversize sweaters. By the time I reached school, I would remove it and hide it in my bag, shivering through lessons and catching colds frequently. These hardships became a form of informal education in resilience, perseverance, and personal responsibility. I learned that adapting to climate challenges required determination, creativity, and endurance lessons no classroom alone could teach.
Water scarcity and food insecurity provided additional, practical lessons in capacity-building. Streams and rivers dried up, forcing villagers to travel long distances to fetch water, sometimes waiting in line for hours, even late into the night. Families survived mainly on dried vegetables called kiwar, harvested and sun-dried at the beginning of the dry season, supplemented occasionally by kiban, our local traditional meal made from corn flour, commonly known in local English as corn fufu. Children, including me, joined our parents in marshy areas far from the village, digging small channels and cultivating plots of vegetables to sustain families during long dry spells. This hands-on work taught critical skills in water management, soil conservation, and sustainable farming, an informal, locally rooted form of climate education that strengthened both individual and community resilience.
The rainy season brought a new set of challenges. Strong winds and heavy rains often destroyed homes and uprooted crops. At school, we learned preventive measures to protect buildings, including planting trees as windbreaks around houses. Initially, some villagers opposed these ideas, believing the storms were caused by witches. Yet as youth and families applied these lessons, the results became undeniable. Today, almost every household plants trees around homes, reducing storm damage and improving environmental conditions. What was once resisted has now become a community-wide practice, demonstrating how education, applied locally, can drive meaningful climate action.
Youth leadership has been central to these efforts. We actively share knowledge, assist with small farms, and encourage peers and families to adopt climate-smart practices. Education, storytelling, and hands-on initiatives empower us to turn knowledge into action, fostering problem-solving, environmental awareness, and community cohesion. These locally rooted strategies show that when youth take leadership, they can transform vulnerability into resilience and create lasting impact.
The experiences of Njanawa mirror global realities. Around the world, young people are using education and local knowledge to lead climate action from school-led reforestation programs in Kenya to sustainable urban farming initiatives in India. Our story demonstrates that even small communities can generate solutions, turning challenges into opportunities for learning, adaptation, and leadership.
Climate change is not a distant threat; it is lived in every dusty road, every cold morning, and every harvested vegetable in Njanawa. Yet through education, action, and youth leadership, we have turned hardship into resilience. Our story shows that when young people learn, lead, and act together, even the smallest communities can forge solutions that protect lives, sustain livelihoods, and inspire hope in the fight against climate change.
Stealing the microphone
By Paz María Juárez (18 years old)– Córdoba, Argentina (3rd place)
The first time I spoke at a climate protest in Córdoba, Argentina, I felt invincible. My hands trembled around the microphone, and for a few minutes, I thought the city had actually listened to me. In that instant, I thought I was saving the planet like a real superhero.
But then the chants ended, the crowd thinned, and I realized something I could barely admit to myself because of the shame: I wanted to be the one holding the microphone. In youth climate activism, there is a secret game we all know too well: a game of stealing the microphone, where everyone wants to be the voice, the name, the hero.
We grow up with the mythology of youth leaders. Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, Vanessa Nakate: their images glow in our feeds, accompanied by captions about bravery and change so wanted. These figures are real, and their impact undeniable, but their fame also casts a long shadow.
Is it their fault? Not intentionally. Social media has turned climate activism into a stage where the world rewards individual performance over collective work. Sometimes, it feels like the movement has become a competition. Who gets to speak at the U. N.? Who wins the next scholarship? Who goes viral for saving the Earth? In the background, the planet keeps warming, indifferent to our auditions of trying to be the world’s next best superhero.
This individualization of climate struggle is one of the biggest traps of today’s social media. Our generation faces both the urgency of ecological collapse and the constant hum of digital self-promotion. Legal thinkers speak of the so-called “jurisprudence of fear,” where fear drives rights and action, yet fear also drives ego. We scroll through apocalyptic headlines and feel that if we are not the ones in the spotlight, our lives will not matter. So we perform. We post. We raise our hands not always to act, but to be seen acting. In this way, even the climate crisis becomes a mirror reflecting our own ambition back at us.
I learned this tension through my work with Jóvenes por el Clima and Amnesty International Argentina. One day, our protest filled the streets of Córdoba. Hundreds of teenagers lifted banners, painted slogans, and chanted until their voices cracked. The photos went viral; a local newspaper interviewed me; my face appeared on NGO social media pages. It felt like victory. But the next week, I sat in a small rural community meeting with farmers whose land had been ravaged by fires in La Calera. There were no microphones, no cameras, no likes. We spent hours talking about soil erosion, water management, and how to rebuild together. That meeting, silent and unseen, mattered more than the speech I gave under the cameras’ gaze. Yet in the game of stealing the microphone, no one is cheering for the quiet work.
What personally has saved me from that trap is storytelling and language justice. Climate change is too vast, too complex, to be solved by a single voice, even a voice like mine; it needs a chorus. In Argentina, real change happens when science becomes a story, when English-language reports transform into Spanish words that carry our own rhythms and realities. When a teacher in Córdoba explains the fires to children using the stories of their own rivers like Suquia and fields like La Cumbrecita, that is, for me, the real climate education.
When we hold workshops where young people write poems about the drought in their hometowns, that is, in fact, capacity-building. Language justice gives ownership of the crisis to the people who live it. Storytelling shifts the spotlight from the lone hero to the community, where it actually belongs.
Through this work, I have personally learned that the microphone is a tool, not a prize. I have learned that collective resilience does not trend online or post cute pictures, but it saves lives. And I have learned that if our generation continues to chase recognition over impact, we will lose the very future we are trying to defend.
I think my generation has a choice: Either keep playing the game of stealing the microphone, or put it down and start building the chorus. Because in the end, climate action is not about being the one who speaks, it is about making sure there is still a world to speak in.
We tell stories to survive
By David Beckham Unaegbu (17 years old) – Houston, USA (4th place)
The very first climate change story that I had ever heard wasn’t from a scientist. It was a Houston neighbor, out in the front yard after another storm had blown through her living room. She never mentioned the words “flood plain” or “climate variability.”
She merely said, “The water keeps coming back, and I don’t know if we can rebuild again.” I was a child, but I remember the trembling in her voice, the feeling that her words were truer than any map I had ever learned. That was when I realized: Climate change isn’t quantified in degrees or inches of rain. It’s measured in anecdotes.
I’ve seen how stories teach what textbooks can’t. At a beach cleanup with students in my neighborhood, we raked in plastic bottles, fishing nets, and Styrofoam that seemed limitless. But what actually sticks with me is when a friend leaned over and said she had swum there as a kid, and her parents now wouldn’t let her. Her story made the cleanup into an act of purpose and not a burden. Now, every can that we picked up wasn’t just trash, but a piece of her childhood lost. That’s when I understood that climate education isn’t always received in class. Sometimes it’s received by the ocean, in the quiet between waves, when somebody shares with you what they’ve lost.
Around the world, young people are tapping into narrative as a means of surviving climate despair and building resilience. In the Philippines, typhoon survivors stand in a room and tell of their own experiences, so that disaster preparedness is not learned from a book but in human memory. In Kenya, drought is mourned and sung, so that the pain and the wisdom of this season are expressed. And in Houston, after Hurricane Harvey, storytelling circles were spaces of healing, where neighbors connected their grief to a shared determination to rebuild. They are not just stories. They are lessons, connecting us with the assurance that we have endured before and can endure again.
Storytelling is effective because it breaks down walls. Science is sometimes a closed door with jargon, graphs, and digits guarding the gate.
But stories? Anecdotes are good keys. A grandmother who cannot find the words to explain why her garden doesn’t yield as it once did will be able to recount more about shifting weather patterns than a whole report would. A child who has a picture of the tree that no longer flowers in the spring can convince a heart sooner than statistics. Storytelling allows the information regarding climate to be shared with anyone, whether you have a degree or not, whether you speak English or not, whether you vote or not. If you have lived through it, you can share it.
And yet there are people who criticize the story. They say it is soft, anecdotal, and unscientific. But I believe that is exactly its strength. Science tells us what is happening; stories tell us why we need to care. And together, data and tale become unstoppable. Without stories, climate change is abstract, distant, outside our capacity to hold it close. With them, it is inarguable, nearby, necessary.
Storytelling has been my door to action. As a student leader, I’ve shared stories at meetings about how extreme heat affects our school community, athletes collapsing at practice, and classrooms stifling when the air conditioning fails. Those stories turned vague concern into
concrete urgency, convincing peers and teachers to push for changes. With organizations like No Space for Hate, I’ve listened to immigrant families explain how language barriers left them unprepared during floods. Their sessions made us push for climate content in multiple languages, since one can’t learn if they are leaving others behind.
What is unique about storytelling is not just that it teaches, it transforms. It translates fear to connection. It translates loneliness to solidarity. It translates loss into a reason to keep going. And in a time when climate change can feel overwhelming, that alone is an alteration.
Climate change is our era’s biggest human story, but it will not be measured in figures. It will be remembered in living rooms where families come back together and together again, in classrooms where students make sense of summers warmer than their parents ever knew, in parks where kids ask why the trees don’t bloom anymore. We share these stories not just to recall, but to endure. And if we hear carefully enough, they can just possibly lead us through envisioning a future worth fighting to live.
Turning science into stories for all
By Talibzada Matanat (15 years old) – Baku, Azerbaijan (5th place)
When I first learned the word climate, it was not in my mother tongue.
I was sitting in an English classroom, staring at diagrams of melting glaciers, while my grandmother at home spoke only Azerbaijani and knew nothing of these “global” lessons. For her, climate change was not a textbook concept – it was the late frost that killed her apricot trees, the dry summers that cracked the soil where she planted tomatoes. Yet she did not have the words to name it, and so she could not fully fight it.
That is when I realized: Climate change is not just about rising temperatures – it is about who gets to understand, and therefore who gets to act. The climate crisis has a hidden inequality: language. The science is loud, but for millions, it is spoken in a tongue they cannot hear. Reports pile up in English; conferences debate in French. But the flood does not pause for translation, and the drought does not wait for subtitles. What we call a “global conversation” is often nothing more than an echo chamber of the privileged.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most of the world still believes that if climate knowledge exists in English, it has already “reached the world.” That is a lie we cannot afford to believe. What is the use of a thousand brilliant studies if the people living the crisis cannot read them? What is the value of global speeches if they leave half of humanity listening in silence?
As young people, we are told we are “the future.” But how can we lead a future that is explained to us in languages we cannot access? Leadership, to me, means refusing to accept that silence. It means building bridges of translation, turning science into stories that belong to everyone, and demanding that climate education is not the privilege of the few but the right of all.
Think about it: The future of this planet does not depend only on policymakers at the top but on decisions made in millions of kitchens, fields, and classrooms. A farmer who understands why rainfall patterns are shifting can change planting strategies. A teenager who learns about emissions in their own language can explain it to their community. A grandmother who grasps why summers burn hotter can demand action from local leaders. Education that speaks to people in their own language does not just inform – it empowers.
And we are already seeing glimpses of this empowerment. Climate Cardinals, a youth-led nonprofit, has translated climate research into more than 100 languages so students from Brazil to Nigeria can learn without barriers. In Kenya, community radio stations broadcast
weather alerts in Swahili, protecting farmers from devastating floods. In Guatemala, Indigenous leaders teach forest protection strategies in Mayan languages, blending ancestral knowledge with modern science. These are not small gestures – they are survival strategies, showing what happens when climate education speaks every tongue.
This is the side of the climate story that many overlook: The problem is not only “denial” or “inaction.” The problem is also exclusion. And exclusion is not an accident – it happens when the world decides whose voices matter and whose voices can be ignored. Every time climate knowledge is locked inside one language, we make that decision again.
I believe this generation must choose differently. To build bridges instead of barriers. To treat translation not as charity but as strategy. To make education not only a ladder for the privileged but a tool for survival in every community. If climate change is the defining battle of our generation, then the battlefield cannot be limited to the languages of power. It must belong to everyone.
This is the choice we face: Will climate education remain a language of privilege, or will it become a language of survival? Survival is not only about carbon and technology. It is about voice. And if we fail to give everyone a voice in this crisis, then we are not building a movement for humanity – we are building a lifeboat for the privileged, and calling it hope.
I refuse to accept that. My generation deserves more than silence. We deserve a future where climate knowledge is as universal as the air we breathe – because without that, there is no future at all.
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