Climate change is the biggest threat of our century, one that will impact every aspect of children's lives: their physical, emotional, moral, financial, and social health and well-being. The relationship between the climate crisis and mental health in young people is therefore by definition multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, requiring multiple perspectives on how to understand and guide younger generations. This book provides a unique synthesis of those perspectives - the science, psychology, and social forces that can be brought to bear on supporting young people's psychological well-being. No matter the setting in which an adult may interact with younger people, this book provides the intellectual rigor and tools to ensure those interactions are as helpful and supportive as they can be.

The first scientific introduction to youth climate distress, related psychological issues, and how individuals working with youth can help.

This volume presents the leading research in child and adolescent grief from a diverse and global perspective, focusing on the systemic, political, and cultural processes that have a direct bearing on the way youth experience loss and grief. Carrie Traher and Lauren J. Breen bring together a global community of academics, practitioners, and social activists to discuss and address the complexity of lived experiences of grief for young people today. Presented in four parts, the contributors begin by providing a theoretical overview of youth, grief, and bereavement, before moving onto other important topics, such as suicide bereavement, the trauma of war, digital grief narratives, child soldiering, and more. Within each chapter, authors address contemporary theoretical frameworks, research findings, and praxis related to both death and non-death losses, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental grief, and grief on the internet and social media. Including contributors from a range of countries and from various disciplines, such as educators, health care professionals, policy makers, and advocates, the themes of coping, resilience, and growth are central and interwoven in each chapter. This handbook is essential for researchers, clinicians, scholars, educators, parents, and activists as to the most pressing societal and global issues that affect youth grief today and to provide context to their personal and professional interactions with youth. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Climate Change and Youth is a pioneering book that opens the door to understanding the profound impact climate change has on the mental health of today’s young people. Chapters provide age-appropriate language for a meaningful dialogue and resources for acknowledging children’s voices, separating fact from fiction about environmental issues, encouraging participation in activism, creating tools to reduce stress, and highlighting inspirational role models and organizations for action. The book includes firsthand examples, research, children’s work, interviews, and terminology. It also shares age-appropriate resources and websites relating to climate change and challenges. Filling a large void in the literature on this topic, this essential resource offers techniques and tools that professionals and caring adults can use to address the stresses associated with climate change and offer strategies for hope, resilience, and action.

This book focuses on Youth Climate Courts, a bold new tool that young people in their teens and twenties can use to compel their local city or county government to live up to its human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis, and take major steps to address it. Tom Kerns shows how youth climate leaders can form their own local Youth Climate Court, with youth judges, youth prosecuting attorneys, and youth jury members, and put their local city or county government on trial for not meeting its human rights obligations. Kerns describes how a Youth Climate Court works, how to start one, what human rights are, what they require of local governments, and what governmental changes a Youth Climate Court can realistically hope to accomplish. The book offers young activists a brand new, user-friendly, cost-free, barrier-free, powerful tool for forcing local governments to come to terms with their obligation to protect the rights of their citizens with respect to the climate crisis. This book offers a unique new tool to young climate activists hungry for genuinely effective ways to directly move governments to aggressively address the climate crisis.

The Impacts of Climate Change: A Comprehensive Study of Physical, Biophysical, Social and Political Issues presents the very real issues associated with climate change and global warming and how it affects the planet and everyone on it. From a physical perspective, the book covers such topics as population pressures, food issues, rising sea-levels and coastline degradation, and health. It then goes on to present social impacts, such as humanitarian issues, ethics, adaptation, urban issues, local action, and socio-economic issues. Finally, it addresses the political impacts, such as justice issues and politics of climate change in different locations. By offering this holistic review of the latest impacts of climate change, the book helps researchers to better understand what needs to be done in order to move toward renewable energy, change societal habits, and move toward sustainable development. - Offers comprehensive coverage of the impacts of climate change from multiple perspectives (physical, social, and political) to develop synergy across disciplines - Presents the latest research and developments on the understanding of climate change impacts on a variety of scales and disciplines - Includes case studies and extensive references for further exploration