Beyond Simulation: Unpacking Agency, Climate Anxiety, and the Emotional Toll in Youth Advocacy
This is the second of a two-part blog post on Shue-kei Joanna Mok’s reflection on their attendance at a two-day climate conference hosted by the largest youth climate justice advocacy group in Hong Kong in summer 2025. This group put tremendous effort into raising the young generation’s awareness of the climate crisis locally and globally, training and sponsoring youth leaders for advocacy work and entrepreneurship. Both entries focus on the first day of the conference. The blogpost is part of NORRAG’s “Provocations for Education from Youth Climate Activism” blog series.
While climate-related games and critical reflections have the potential to help youth identify and challenge their experiences regarding impacts and problems caused by colonialism and capitalism, these dynamics and realities are rarely explicitly discussed in educational spaces (see previous blog). Big corporations and politicians’ constant inaction and green-washing efforts are prominent causes for youth’s climate anxiety. By not addressing these causes, youth can be overwhelmed with rage, frustration, and helplessness.
This post elaborates how neglecting youth sentiments and failing to act on systemic injustice undermine youth empowerment, reinforce class divides, and risk performative tokenism. Such grievances also risk portraying marginalized communities as powerless victims while blaming others as indifferent and selfish. I posit that genuine youth empowerment and climate action require intergenerational collaboration to challenge capitalist structures and honor youth agency.
What Went Wrong?
As part of a youth-led climate conference, I joined around 30 other attendees at a simulated town hall focused on municipal responses to housing and energy issues. The simulated town hall interest-holders included: a chairman of the council, a food delivery driver, a real estate developer, a trader, a coffee shop owner, a retired secondary school teacher, an environmental engineering student (a keen scuba diver), a single mother, a construction worker, and an environmental group representative. Each role came with a brief background profile to help participants identify with their respective interest-holders. Playing a construction worker, my background profile stated that I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I hoped my school-aged daughter could grow up healthily. The session dealt with two proposals: (1) whether to develop the Northern Metropolitan Area to increase land supply for housing, and (2) whether to construct offshore wind and solar power plants. For each proposal, the chairman would orally provide background information, then stakeholders would discuss and negotiate with others before voting on the proposed matter. The first proposal passed (6-3), while the energy projects were voted down (1-8).
Afterwards, participants were presented with some AI-generated visuals depicting the consequences of the voting results, an aspect of the simulation that problematically resulted only in increased despair for participants rather than spurring agency and visions for the future. With visuals of severe flooding and urban apocalypse scenarios in the background, interest-holders were presented with dire news headlines and descriptions of their simulated futures. As a construction worker, I received news headlines about a recent death from heatstroke after a construction worker spent long hours outdoors in scorching weather. Many simulation participants felt overwhelmed by the bleak outlook, exclaiming how powerless they felt as citizens who were already concerned about climate change and injustice.
After the brouhaha over the potential doomsday futures, I turned to another participant and asked: how could we have voted differently based on our given profiles? The simple answer was, we couldn’t really under the current neoliberal system. I felt perplexed and torn: I would have either died at work under extreme weather conditions or not been able to bring food to the table. Either way, my daughter would not have been able to grow up healthily.
We read through each other’s profiles; we all would have voted the same way as others did, both in the simulation and real life. There was an overwhelming number of interest-holders positioned as socioeconomically marginalized with little space for participants to imagine possibilities to vote differently in this exercise. Our future was predetermined by the prescribed stances in the simulation. In reality, priorities of the marginalized communities in particular are similarly highly prescribed by the neoliberal system.
Breaking Free from the Forever Exploited Position
As the organizer was wrapping up the session, they described the voting results and the sense of powerlessness felt by the advocacy groups as “the result of our own people oppressing our own people.” This misplaced, bilateral accusation is precisely the fruit of capitalist success in diverting the gaze of oppressed people away from systemic oppressions, class struggles, and coloniality. Upon reflection, I realized that as long as we kept theorizing and imagining ourselves under the current neoliberal system, most of us would remain exploited. Rather than challenging current perceptions, promoting imagination, exploring untapped alternatives, and educating participants on the complexities of navigating these situations democratically, the simulation maintained the status quo, resulting in intensified despair and distress.
While the simulation depictions were realistic, the lack of nuance and diversity represented everyday people and environmental groups with limited agency and options. Fearmongering hence became a natural part of the exercise, rather than envisioning solidarity and change.
To me, this is an obvious sign that we need to do youth advocacy differently and more strategically. Simulation exercises should reflect other forms of civic engagement, promoting various ways for participants to express agency and imagine alternate ways to resist and make change.
Centering Climate Anxiety and Decentering Romanticization of Youth-led Advocacy through Intergenerational Co-exploration
Current climate-related campaigns mainly focus on raising public awareness. However, for those who are already knowledgeable and concerned, the repetitive iteration and amplification of the catastrophic consequences of inaction, which fuels emotions and anxiety, can exacerbate feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and resignation.
Cautioning the tendency to equate “youth-led” with “guaranteed youth empowerment,” I second Tanu Biswas and her colleagues’ call to disrupt liberalism and the dependency-independency dichotomy, and to move towards a deep interdependence, a relational ontology, and intergenerational co-exploration. Especially in activism that fundamentally seeks to disrupt existing unjust norms and structures enforced by previous generations, adults cannot only be guides, facilitators, or resource providers to youth in this process. Children, youth, and adults need to be active knowledge and future co-constructors, co-disrupters of barriers, and co-explorers of possibilities. In a co-exploration paradigm, youth and adults share experiences of navigating the system and the identified systemic pitfalls, and co-explore approaches to improve, resist, and build. In the workshops and the conference, youth advocates actively organized and implemented the activities, whereas adults acted more as logistic support and operational facilitators. Encouraging youth to lead is not the only way to empower them; addressing root causes, exploring alternative systems and structures with youth and keeping them stay hopeful and motivated are equally important.
What Kind of Movement are We Building?
As a youth climate advocate myself, the day’s experience was bittersweet. It was encouraging to see more Hong Kong youth being aware and vocal about climate justice, yet alarming to experience the emotional toll of youth advocacy through activities designed and led by my peers. While there were other workshops occurring in parallel to the ones I attended, attention to mental wellness among (youth) advocates in general was largely neglected at the conference and beyond. What kind of movement are we building if our young leaders are burning out before they’ve even begun?
Before solidarity becomes yet another buzzword, I hope solidarity can be built across generations to truly center youth empowerment and agency, so that youth climate activism can be more healthy, sustainable, resilient, and transformative.
The Author:
Shue-kei Joanna Mok is a PhD Candidate in International Education Policy at University of Maryland, College Park.