How Is Climate Change Affecting Teenagers?

When fire stalks your childhood.

Lucy Currie, 14

Jasper, Alberta

In June, after much negotiating with their parents, Lucy Currie and three of her friends went solo camping for the first time. Growing up in Jasper, Alberta, at the edge of a vast national park, Currie has explored the backcountry since she was a little kid, but never without adults. The group set up their tent, roasted hot dogs and played card games late into the night, while one friend’s dad camped nearby just in case. “It was so much fun,” Currie says.

A few weeks later, wildfires swept through Jasper National Park, burning over 81,000 acres and ravaging the town of Jasper. Currie found out about the evacuation order while she and her family were on a weeklong vacation; soon after, she learned that the fire had consumed her home and her grandparents’ house next door. “I was in shock,” she says. Normally an overpacker, Currie had been proud to bring just one backpack and one stuffed animal; now, everything else she owned was gone. “It sounds kind of dumb, but I was just sad about what I had collected on my walls,” she says. “I had so many pictures, like Polaroids of me and my friends, and random cutouts from magazines.”

‘It sounds kind of dumb, but I was just sad about what I had collected on my walls.’

Currie is back at school now, although with about a third of the town’s buildings destroyed, life doesn’t feel back to normal. Her family is living in a rental that’s half an hour outside town, which means she has to ask for a ride anytime she wants to meet up with friends. “I have to plan everything ahead,” she says.

Currie is still grappling with what she lost, including her ability to turn away from climate change. “I’ve always heard of other towns being affected,” she says, “but it was just a passing thought.”

When it’s hard to buy rice.

Obama Mchembe, 15

Toangoma, Tanzania

Obama Mchembe pays attention to rain. He has to. When the roads flood, he stays home from school for days at a time. Floods, heat and drought make it harder to grow crops, so his family struggles to buy staple foods, including maize flour, rice and sugar. ‘‘In the past, it was normal for us to eat foods like rice,’’ Mchembe says. ‘‘But now, for a month, we can eat rice once or twice.”

Mchembe worries about what climate change means for the future, both for himself and for his country. He and his classmates have started planting cassia trees in a field beside their school — a simple act that ‘‘makes all of us feel courage.’’

When going outside makes you sick.

Ayesha Ali, 16

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Next year, Ayesha Ali will take an exam to determine where she can go to college. The competition is intense, and Ali wants to become a surgeon, so she knows she has to prepare. But it’s extremely difficult for her to focus. “The heat and air pollution give me a headache a lot of the time,” she says.

In some parts of Dhaka, breathing the air is the equivalent of smoking 1.6 cigarettes a day. But it’s not just the pollution. “Climate change affects our country in every way,” Ali says. Unicef estimates that four million people live in slums in Dhaka, many of whom fled floods and eroding riverbanks elsewhere in Bangladesh. Unpredictable rains flood the roads and create health hazards.

‘It feels like I was born in the wrong generation.’

Ali’s skin often breaks out into painful rashes and pimples, and despite her efforts to keep her long hair healthy, it has started to fall out in clumps. She suspects that it has to do with the air pollution. Going outside is an ordeal. “Traveling exhausts me a lot,” Ali says. She leaves her apartment to go to tutoring centers, where she studies, but otherwise stays home, watching TV or reading fantasy novels, with the fan on and the blinds closed.

Ali remembers a time before the weather made her feel so bad, when she and her friends would meet up in an open field by her grandmother’s house, a space now covered by buildings. In the winter months, sometimes they can still meet up outside, but the city is so overcrowded that there’s not really anywhere to go. When she does see her friends, they often talk about their physical ailments:headaches, insomnia, acne. Climate change has become the lens through which they see their days.

Confronted with the cascading impacts of warming — floods, erosion, overcrowding, desperation, crime — Ali feels overwhelmed, as if she has no choice but to leave her country. “It feels like I was born in the wrong generation,” she says.

When glaciers disappear before your eyes.

Daniela Bazán, 16

Huaraz, Peru

Daniela Bazán has recently started to feel a strange kind of disappointment — a longing for a version of her home that she never got to experience, back when glaciers truly dominated the mountain range. ‘‘Early in the morning, it’s so beautiful when it first lights up,’’ she says. ‘‘I imagine it would have looked so beautiful before.’’

For hers and other nearby communities, the melting of the glaciers is a practical catastrophe: The snowy mountains provide water for drinking and agriculture, and also foster a tourist economy. Bazán’s parents tell her about when they could go to a nearby river and catch enough fish for a meal. ‘‘Now the river is empty,’’ Bazán says.

When you feel like one of the lucky ones.

Ireoluwa Ajayi, 16

Ota, Nigeria

Ota, where Ireoluwa Ajayi lives, is a market town an hour’s drive north of Lagos. In recent years, the region has experienced extreme heat and heavy rainfall. Around Nigeria, floods contaminate drinking water and create breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes; the high temperatures can lead to heatstroke and rashes.

Ajayi emphasizes how lucky he feels. His family has fans that they use at night during heat waves, which are powered by a mini solar panel. They have a water purifier to use when water sources become contaminated. They used to live in an area of Lagos State where the flooding was much worse; they were able to move to safer ground, while many others were not. “I think about the people that don’t have a way to leave, especially children,” he says. “When the weather is so bad, I’ll be thinking of how they do without food and without water.”

‘I don’t get to play outside or hang out with my friends.’

But Ajayi, for all his concern about others, is hardly unscathed himself. For a while he got heat rashes, which sometimes grew so painful that he wound up hospitalized. When it floods, the roads get so bad that Ajayi has to take off his shoes and walk in the water to get home from school. Other days, flooding forces his school to close and makes seeing friends impossible, leaving him isolated. “I don’t get to play outside or hang out with my friends because there’ll be water everywhere,” he says. Instead, he stays home and draws.

Ajayi believes that once people connect the dots on the effects of climate change, they’ll start to take action. “I feel like a lot of people are not taught about climate,” he says, “and that’s why they keep burning up fossil fuels.”

When you realize the burden’s on you.

Athanasios Kosteas, 16

Kalamata, Greece

Lately, Athanasios Kosteas has been feeling angry more often. He attributes it to the heat. In September, the temperature regularly rose to 90 degrees or higher. Without any air-conditioning at school, Kosteas found it nearly impossible to concentrate. The heat gets to him even more at his family’s restaurant, where he delivers hot plates of eggplant souvlaki to customers. ‘‘When it’s hot, I feel dizzy, and I get angrier and angrier, and I don’t want to work anymore,’’ he says.

As a member of Greece’s youth parliament, Kosteas had the chance to ask the country’s education minister about climate change, only to be given platitudes in response. The burden of addressing the crisis, Kosteas realizes, will fall to his generation — ‘‘not politicians.’’

When your motherland is being swallowed by the ocean.

Sara Saumanaia, 15

Christchurch, New Zealand, and Tuvalu

When Sara Saumanaia thinks about climate change, she thinks about both of her homes. She sees New Zealand, where she has lived her entire life, as her homeland. And she sees Tuvalu, where her family is from, as her motherland. “It’s hard to see one country doing so well,” she says, “and one country struggling.”

Saumanaia and her family live on the east side of Christchurch, a predominantly working-class neighborhood of Maori and Pacific Islander immigrants. The area is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change; after a heavy rain, the streets around Saumanaia’s home regularly flood.

Once, during a lesson on climate change, Saumanaia’s science teacher asked if anyone in the class was from Tuvalu. Everyone looked at Saumanaia, the only Tuvaluan in her grade. The teacher explained that the island might soon be subsumed by rising sea levels. Students oohed, as if she were in trouble; some classmates laughed.

“I’m a really confident, brave, strong person, and I know what I stand for,” Saumanaia says. “But there’s also my family back home, who I pray for every day. They’re just struggling, and here they are, mocking them, because their island is about to be gone.”

‘It’s hard to see one country doing so well and one country struggling.’

She wants to change the perception of Tuvaluans and those from other small Pacific islands. And she wants to foster pride among the next generation of Tuvaluans too. She practices the fatele, or traditional Tuvalu dance, and the Tuvaluan language in part so she can pass it on to her future children. “Even if our country does end up going away,” she says, “that doesn’t make our culture and who we are as people go away.”