Y-Adapt: CCA youth engagement curriculum

Introduction

Climate change is happening. Impacts are projected to become increasingly severe. Youth can be important agents of change in raising awareness and taking action.

‘Y-Adapt’ or ‘Youth Adapt’ is an interactive, games-based curriculum. It educates, engages and inspires youth to act in their communities to adapt to climate change.These actions are local interventions that reduce the impacts of severe weather-related events. The events can be rapid onset events -such as heavy rain leading to flooding- or slow onset events - such as extreme heat leading to drought. The curriculum is broken into seven sessions each with a different goal.

How does Y-Adapt create real world change?

• Knowledge and Sharing – Youth learn about climate change and its impacts and can share their experiences with other youth around the world.
• Community – Youth engage their local communities on climate change action and become part of the global Y-Adapt community.
• Action – Youth work together to adapt resources in their community to reduce climate change impacts and become more climate resilient.

Institutional background and trainer

Y-Adapt is the product of a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the Philippine Red Cross, PLAN International and the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.

We also extend our gratitude to the following partners, which have played a key role in the testing and finalisation of the materials:  PLAN Philippines, Haiti Red Cross, Guatemala Red Cross and Iranian Red Crescent.

All Y-Adapt materials are licensed with Creative Commons Attribution: NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 international License.

Who would find this useful?

Youth workers, teachers, researchers and anyone wanting to deliver climate change training to young people in communities to support climate action.

Training material

Running Y-Adapt:

• Youth - This curriculum is designed for youth aged 13-25
• Training - Facilitators should be trained in the methodology
• Inclusive - Strive for an inclusive, gender balanced participant selection
• Sessions - 7 sessions, that take approximately 1 hour each – see time guides 
• Duration - Recommended to run 1 or 2 modules per week over 3-4 weeks
• Intensive - It is possible to run Y-Adapt intensively over 3 days
• Action - After module 6, youth have 6-8 weeks to implement their action plan
• Monitor - Progress is innovatively monitored through youth-led photo diaries
• Evaluate - Actions are documented in ‘Adaptation Cards’ to evaluate outputs
• Inspire - Y-Adapt actions are shared globally to inspire more youth-led action!