By combining scientific, financial, experiential, and Indigenous knowledge in their advocacy campaigns, youth activists act as sophisticated intermediaries between knowledge systems and social change efforts.
Global youth climate movements, such as Fridays for Future (FFF) to climate activists like Greta Thunberg, both center science for climate action. However, science is inadequate for solving ethical problems of systemic inequalities, discrimination, or exploitation—core issues that the youth climate movement highlights since they see climate change as a justice and ethical issue. The youth climate movement has gone beyond the mainstream climate movement in linking climate action to broader struggles for affordable housing, fair wages, workplace safety, and equity, including feminism, anti-racism, and LGBTQI+ rights, to draw attention to systemic failures of political institutions to address these intertwining crises. This suggests that youth may be critically evaluating and assessing information from different knowledge systems, engaging with alternative ways of knowing, and envisioning alternative futures, developing crucial knowledge of climate justice issues through climate organizing that they may not necessarily learn about in school. While scholars claim that youth climate movements are more likely to be include diverse knowledge systems, these claims need to be empirically tested since we know little about how young activists gather, evaluate, and deploy information from scientific knowledge (SK), local knowledge (LK), Indigenous ways of knowing (IK), experiential expertise (EE), and financial knowledge (FK) to drive their advocacy campaigns.
This article explores how youth groups in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Canada, navigate and share information across multiple knowledge systems to strengthen climate advocacy. Previous articles in this series have explored youth-led commoning for climate advocacy and relationships of care among young people advocating for climate justice. For this article, I draw from 28 interviews with members of two youth groups—one, a university-based fossil-fuel divestment advocacy group, hereafter Group 1, and the second, a community-based group with the mission to enhance climate literacy and political advocacy, hereafter Group 2. I examine patterns in information gathering across various sources, the role of knowledge brokers, and the factors that determine which information youth activists use. These findings shed light on the strategies youth employ to critically engage with different forms of knowledge to inform their climate justice campaigns.
How youth access and share knowledge
Interviews with youth climate activists in Ontario suggest that they engage with multiple knowledge systems by drawing on both horizontal channels (across peers or similar levels), such as Google Scholar, university libraries, news outlets, archives, and peer networks, and vertical channels (movement up and down hierarchies), including faculty, graduate students, and community members to develop resources for their advocacy. While these patterns may be those seen in other activist networks, these findings suggest that even youth climate activists are part of knowledge circulation across digital and institutional spaces of the climate movement, which needs further exploration. Interestingly, none of the interviewees mentioned engaging with artificial intelligence (AI) for their advocacy.
For Group 1, financial knowledge is paramount. Members investigate the university’s ties to fossil-fuel companies using annual budgets, bank reports, and financial disclosures. They complement this with scientific information, social media, news sources, and peer-reviewed articles to strengthen divestment campaigns. Faculty and graduate students act as key knowledge brokers, providing access to specialized insights and information on campus events, advising on strategy, and supporting the interpretation of complex data.
Group 2, in contrast, focuses on community engagement and education, relying heavily on scientific and local knowledge to design projects that resonate with youth and community members. They collaborate with Indigenous partners to ensure cultural relevance and legitimacy, while also drawing on experiential knowledge from local experts. Group 2, for example, crowdsources local experiences to document climate impacts, blending community-rooted perspectives with scientific evidence.
Factors shaping information use
Youth activists evaluate information based on credibility, salience, legitimacy, author positionality, effectiveness, and accuracy. Credibility encompasses the robustness of methods, peer review, and transparency. On credibility, one interviewee said, “When it comes to finding resources on the Internet, in today’s age, anybody can put anything on the Internet, so the information has to be accurate. It has to be informative, and your source has to be credible. If your source is not credible, then it’s difficult to share that information with the public.”
Interestingly, youth activists also engage strategically with misrepresented information and science, even when it doesn’t meet their criteria for credibility. For example, Group 1 uses greenwashing attempts by the university to draw attention to the persistence of fossil-fuel investments despite claims of sustainability. This indicates that young people are not just passively consuming knowledge but are skillfully evaluating the knowledge to identify and repurpose distorted information for advocacy purposes. As one interviewee said, “I am looking into what the university has posted on the UPS [University Pension Scheme] website. I’m not sure what kind of information that would be. Everything that they write has greenwashing language, and it’s hard to read through, but I’m not sure if that qualifies as scientific. They do talk about statistics and their emissions, but that information [on the website] is not completely scientific.”
Salience reflects the relevance of information to the local or comparable context, including lessons learned from other universities or communities. For instance, interviewees mentioned using reports from the University of British Columbia (UBC) on divestment, organizing tactics of students located in other universities, and information from other campus organizers as being useful. An interviewee said, “The most useful thing that we had to inspire us was the report that UBC wrote about their universities, [and its] ties to the fossil fuel industry. We basically based our entire report off of them. We even got in contact with them and arranged meetings virtually to get advice from them about how to do ours. So that was super helpful.”
Legitimacy refers to a study being produced in a transparent manner, taking actor values and perspectives into account. Both groups navigate tensions in using Indigenous Knowledge (IK) because of the flawed perception that IK may not be legitimate within science and policy circles. For instance, as one member said, “If we rely too much on scientific evidence, then we are omitting that kind of emotional aspect that we are trying to garner from students on campus. Conversely, if we rely too much on Indigenous knowledge, for example, then our findings may be viewed as not as legitimate. And while that’s not the case, of course, unfortunately, that’s how many people still do think that scientific knowledge is the most legitimate and that other types of knowledge, like Indigenous Knowledge needs to be grounded in those scientific findings.” These dynamics mirror the broader challenge of balancing scientific and Indigenous knowledge in other aspects of environmental governance, such as forest restoration and collaborative water governance.
Implications for youth activism and education
These findings suggest that while youth may share some knowledge-seeking patterns with older activists, what distinguishes knowledge sharing in the youth climate movement is not how they share information but why—to claim space, to be seen as credible and legitimate, to be heard in arenas where they are often dismissed as inexperienced or labelled as “truants” by adults.
These findings highlight the importance of equipping youth with a broad toolkit of knowledge and skills. Environmental studies curricula in higher education can support youth activism by including training in financial literacy and critical evaluation of diverse information sources. Understanding financial structures, for instance, enables youth groups to pursue tangible outcomes such as fossil-fuel divestment, while critical thinking around credibility, positionality, and misrepresented science strengthens advocacy campaigns. Such skills are not just relevant to the activism and advocacy efforts of young people but are essential life skills that prepare them to navigate a polarized media, the rise of AI, the pervasiveness of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation, and accelerating climate risks.
Finally, youth groups demonstrate that knowledge is not merely technical but relational. Networks with faculty, peers, local experts, and community members are vital for navigating institutional barriers and translating complex information into actionable campaigns. By combining scientific, financial, experiential, and IK in their advocacy campaigns, youth activists act as sophisticated intermediaries between knowledge systems and social change efforts. As cities and institutions seek to engage youth in climate governance, recognizing the diverse knowledge systems they navigate and supporting their access, critical interpretation, and use will be essential. In doing so, we not only empower the next generation of climate leaders but also enrich the broader movement for climate action drawn from multiple ways of knowing.
Praneeta Mudaliar
Mississauga
On The Nature of Cities
