CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 21Climate Change Communication and PerceptionEnvironmental Education and SustainabilityEnvironmental and sustainability education

Engaging young people in climate change action: A scoping review of sustainability programs

Open access
Hohenhaus, Madeleine, Boddy, Jennifer, Rutherford, Shannon, Roiko, Anne, Hennessey, Natasha·2023·Sustainability
DOI 10.3390/su15054259
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Young people are stepping forward and engaging in or leading programs promoting climate action and sustainability. To optimize program outcomes, it is important to understand the nature of these programs, as well as their successes and enablers. Consequently, a scoping review was conducted across six databases, Taylor and Francis, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, Sage and Wiley, to examine existing programs that promote climate change action amongst young people aged 12 to 25 years. The review sought to determine what is known about these programs and their outcomes by documenting what elements contribute to successful behavior changes in young people. Forty-eight articles were included in the review, with almost half of the studies from the United States. Eight elements recurred throughout the reviewed journal articles including intersecting external and internal factors contributing to reported behavior change. External factors included the social environment, place, knowledge, leadership and goal setting development that fostered internal factors that included, self-efficacy, identity, agency and action competence, and systems thinking. Learning from these programs to improve design and ensure sustainable outcomes is key to improving the capabilities of young people to continue responding to the climate challenge.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3390/su15054259

Cites

70 of 71 references verified0 citation errors · 1 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Only a handful of existing reviews focus on the local governance scale.

    “and only a handful focuses on the local governance scale (Anyon et al., 2018; Fitzgerald et al., 2021; Hohenhaus et al., 2023; Macauley et al., 2022; Weiss, 2020; and Yamaguchi, Tuong, et al., 2023).”

    From Between promise and practice: a scoping review of the democratic outcomes of youth participation in local governance (2026) · cites this paper as Hohenhaus et al., 2023

    The Materials and Methods section defines this review’s focus as climate-related behavior-change programs for young people aged 12–25, not local governance. Its stated research question concerns program design and outcomes, so it does not fit the citing sentence’s characterization of reviews focused on the local governance scale. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 72 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Ojala, M. Eco-anxiety. Rsa J. 2018, 164, 10-15.
  2. Pörtner, H.-O.; Roberts, D.C.; Adams, H.; Adelekan, I.; Adler, C.; Adrian, R.; Aldunce, P.; Ali, E.; Ara Begum, R.; Bednar-Friedl, B.; et al. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK; New York, NY, USA, 2022; Available online: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_TechnicalSummary.pdf (accessed on 8 February 2023).
  3. Ruppert-Stroescu, M.; LeHew, M.L.A.; Connell, K.Y.H.; Armstrong, C.M. Creativity and Sustainable Fashion Apparel Consump- tion: The Fashion Detox. Cloth. Text. Res. J. 2015, 33, 67-82. [CrossRef] · DOI
  4. Novick, R. Empowering a Movement: The Influence of Climate Change Education on the Rise in Youth Climate Activism in the United States. In Proceedings of the AGU Fall Meeting, New Orleans, LA, USA, 13-17 December 2021; p. ED55H-02. Available online: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021AGUFMED55H..02N (accessed on 14 February 2023).
  5. Etmanski, C.; Bishop, K.; Page, M.B. Adult Learning Through Collaborative Leadership: New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, Number 156; John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, USA, 2018.
  6. Ramkissoon, H.; Graham Smith, L.D.; Weiler, B. Testing the dimensionality of place attachment and its relationships with place satisfaction and pro-environmental behaviours: A structural equation modelling approach. Tour. Manag. 2013, 36, 552-566.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Hohenhaus, M., Boddy, J., Rutherford, S., Roiko, A., & Hennessey, N.
Affiliations
  • Griffith University (AU)
  • Climate Action Beacon, Gold Coast, QLD 4215, Australia
Corresponding author
Hohenhaus, Madeleine
ORCID
Venue
Sustainability
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2023-02-27
Volume
15
Issue
5
Pages
4259
ISSN
2071-1050 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3390/su15054259
OpenAlex
W4322629433
Cited by
21
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 2
FWCI
9.06
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Sustainability (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Griffith Research Online (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
Climate Action Beacon, Griffith University
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Environmental Education and Sustainability
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Environmental and sustainability education
Keywords
youth climate activism, sustainability programs, youth, behavior change, self-efficacy, social identity, agency, systems thinking, goal setting, leadership development, program design, climate change

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review