I sat in the comfort of my room, contemplating which outfit to wear for a picnic a few miles from home, when my eye caught a moving image on the television screen. The caption read: Flood forces family out of their ancestral home. In that moment, something shifted. Climate change, which I had long treated as a distant abstraction and a crisis unfolding in other people’s lives on other people’s continents, had arrived uninvited at my doorstep in Nigeria. What followed was a confrontation with a question this article seeks to examine from a sub-Saharan African perspective. Why do young people, who bear the least historical responsibility for carbon emissions, continue to absorb the worst consequences of climate inaction? And what does this demand of us, individually, collectively, and as a matter of policy, within Nigeria and beyond? This article argues that climate change is a youth policy issue defined by intergenerational injustice where young people in climate-vulnerable regions bear a disproportionate burden with the least formal power to shape decisions, an imbalance the World Economic Forum calls a democratic deficit. It examines how this deficit is deepened by the limited agency of young people, especially in Global South nations, in international climate forums, and draws out the obligations this places on practitioners, researchers and policymakers in the UK and globally.

A global crisis, unequally distributed

The popular framing of climate change as a universal threat tends to obscure the unequal way in which its consequences are distributed. When Storm Babet made landfall in the UK in October 2023, it produced a severe rainfall event, with some areas up to 200mm of rain (Met Office, 2024). More than 1,000 homes were affected in England, with internal flooding to 182 properties and 9 businesses in Rotherham alone (Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, 2023). The images broadcast around the world were affecting, yet for many in the Global South, including myself in Nigeria, such disasters registered as tragedies belonging to distant geographies. They seemed isolated from our daily reality by oceans and, perhaps, by the comfortable illusion of our own imperviousness.

That illusion was tested in 2024 when record floodings across Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mali forced 10 million children out of school as thousands of schools were submerged or repurposed as shelters for displaced families (Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, 2024). For the first time the human face of climate change felt proximate. The victims were not people on distant shores but neighbours on a shared continent. Yet the dominant response, in my own social circles as much as in formal political discourse, remained confined to expressions of sympathy, trending hashtags and the offer of thoughts and prayers.

Recent years have shattered whatever remained of the illusion of insulation. In May 2025, catastrophic flash floods struck Mokwa in Niger State, Nigeria, killing at least five hundred people, leaving over six hundred missing and displacing thousands, more than half of them children aged twelve and under (UN News, 2025; UNOCHA, 2025).  What the evidence from 2022 to 2025 confirms is that flooding in Nigeria is no longer episodic but structural, with cumulative humanitarian and livelihood losses falling year after year on the same flood-prone communities (UNOCHA, 2026; YELF Climate Trust Foundation, 2026).

Young people as disproportionate victims

The distributional injustice of climate change extends beyond geography. Within affected populations, young people are consistently identified as among the most vulnerable. The  conditions in which they grow up render them disproportionately exposed to climate shocks while simultaneously excluding them from the decision-making processes that shape the policy response (UNFCCC, 2024). While the Youth Movement at the Conference of Parties (COP), through constituencies like Youth Non-governmental Organisations (YOUNGO), has pushed hard for a seat at the table, access to these spaces remains deeply unequal. For many young people in African countries affected by climate shocks, the barriers of visas and funding mean that COP is still out of reach, and the process has yet to reflect the voices of those who are disproportionately bearing the impacts (UNFCCC, 2023).

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has documented how recurrent flooding intensifies existing disparities for young Nigerians, who already face a 42.5 per cent rate of unemployment (IOM, 2024). The destruction of farmland and livelihoods has pushed many towards irregular migration, while in the north-east, young people facing acute deprivation have been recruited by insurgent groups (IOM, 2024). These cascading effects on educational attainment, mental health and long-term economic opportunity represent a form of intergenerational injustice that rarely features prominently in mainstream climate policy discourse.

The concept of intergenerational justice is not new to policy analysis. Discussions of pension systems, national debt and environmental regulation have long invoked the obligation of present generations to avoid imposing unfair burdens on those who follow. What distinguishes the climate crisis is the starkness of the asymmetry. It is predominantly the older generations of the industrialised world who have consumed carbon at historically unprecedented rates, and predominantly the young people of the Global South who are already living with the consequences. Nigeria, a country whose per capita carbon emissions remain far below the global average, is ranked second in the world for children’s climate risk. In 2025, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion affirming that environmental protection is a precondition to the full enjoyment of human rights, a ruling that youth advocates have since argued carries significant implications for how states must respond to the climate crisis (WY4CJ, 2026). This legal recognition of the link between environment and human rights lends new weight to demands that the intergenerational dimension of climate change be treated not just as a moral question but as a matter of justiciable obligation.

From passive witness to active citizenship

The personal trajectory traced in the opening of this article, from indifference to awareness to action, mirrors a broader dynamic that youth climate advocates have increasingly sought to reach at scale. The emergence of global youth-led climate movements signalled a generational refusal to accept the terms of a crisis they did not create. Research on the Fridays for Future movement found that youth activists articulate three overlapping conceptions of injustice, namely intergenerational, global, and democratic (Buhre, 2025). Similar issues are raised in UNFCCC youth consultations at COP, where young delegates consistently resist framing climate change as only a problem for future generations. Instead they highlight how climate harm already falls unevenly across race, class, geography and gender today, and call for urgent and equitable climate actions (YOUNGO Global Youth Statement, 2025).

Yet the limitations of protest and symbolic gesture are well recognised. Sustained systemic change requires the construction of political pressure capable of altering the incentive structures within which corporations and governments operate. One measure of the challenge is this: only 2.8 per cent of parliamentarians globally are under the age of thirty, and the average age of a parliamentarian is fifty-one (World Economic Forum, 2025). This imbalance creates what the World Economic Forum has called a democratic deficit, one in which the people who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions are those with the least formal power to shape them.

Young people and the youth organisations that represent them have a vital role to play in demanding regulatory interventions through direct engagement with political processes and through targeted corporate accountability campaigns.

Towards a youth-centred climate policy

What would it mean to take seriously the intergenerational dimensions of climate justice in policy terms? A growing body of scholarship on transformative youth climate justice proposes several principles. First, closing the climate finance gap in ways that specifically prioritise youth-responsive activities, especially in climate impact-prone regions of the world, is identified as an urgent requirement (Pham et al., 2025). The 2022 floods assessment found that 62.9 per cent of affected Nigerian households had put no preventative measures in place to mitigate future floods (UNDP, 2023). This is evidence of a structural gap between the resources available to communities facing acute climate risk and the scale of the challenge they confront. International climate finance commitments, long promised and consistently underfunded, must be directed towards the communities most exposed, with particular attention to the services on which young people depend, including health, education, water and sanitation.

Second, young people must be substantively included, and not just consulted, in the design and evaluation of climate adaptation and mitigation policy. The tendency to treat youth voice as a symbolic addition to pre-determined policy agendas, rather than as a genuine source of knowledge and legitimate interest, represents a failure of democratic principle as much as a failure of climate governance. Research is clear that when young people are involved in designing climate solutions, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility, enhancing the likelihood of successful adoption and long-term impact (World Economic Forum, 2025).

Third, the intersection of climate change and youth policy must become a more prominent feature of academic and practitioner discourse in youth work and youth services. Climate change is, at its core, a question about the conditions in which young people will grow up, work and build lives. The disruption of schooling, the destruction of livelihoods, the displacement of families and the psychological burden of ecological grief are all concerns that fall squarely within the remit of those who work with and on behalf of young people. Recognising this intersection is the first step towards developing the kind of interdisciplinary, youth-centred response that the scale of the crisis now demands.

A call to action beyond borders

The grey sky outside my window and the downpour that later cleared felt like a warning. By 2025, that warning had become a recurring reality for millions of young Nigerians. The floods that struck Mokwa in May of that year were the latest episode in a pattern of escalating climate harm that research, data and lived experience all confirm is cumulative and disproportionately borne by young people.

For readers of this journal, particularly those based in the UK, the Nigerian experience is not a distant tragedy to be observed with detached sympathy. It is a mirror and a challenge. The same global systems of carbon dependency that produce flooding in the Niger basin also intensify heatwaves in London (Met Office, 2026). The intergenerational injustice visible in Nigeria is a concentrated expression of a global reality that no country can cordon off.

Acting on this reality therefore requires more than symbolic gestures of solidarity, and showers of thoughts and prayers. It demands a clear call to action. First, for youth policymakers and practitioners, recognise that climate change is a youth work issue and therefore central to the goal of supporting young people’s development. Integrate climate adaptation into youth service planning and advocate for climate-resilient education infrastructure.

Second, for international bodies and donor governments, fulfil long-standing climate finance pledges with a specific youth focus. The communities building flood defences from mud in Nigeria’s Delta region are not waiting for permission to act. They are waiting for resources. Direct funding to youth-led adaptation initiatives, not as a charitable afterthought but as a strategic investment in the resilience of a generation.

Third, for young people, let us continue to demand a seat at the table where decisions are made, not as symbolic representatives but as co-architects of policy. The global youth climate movement has already demonstrated that another politics is possible. What is now required is the institutional will to translate that possibility into lasting structures of participation.

The chance to act remains. The question is whether decision-makers, in Nigeria, in the UK, and across the international community will take it before the next flash flood arrives.