Almost four years into the People and Planet project, all our followers know that we are indeed not Camels. However, a lot more work related to the Sustainable Development Goals has been done in the backstage, and that all became materialized last April in our International Bootcamp, which involved 29 young participants from all the YACCs of the project.

The Youth Advisory Climate Councils are local groups formed with young people that want to act against climate change. They discuss the challenges faced by their own community, talk about the localisation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and propose concrete actions to improve sustainability and living standards in their communities.

On April 2024, the People & Planet project invited representatives from each national YACC to attend the international bootcamp to exchange practices and to further develop the innovative ideas that the young people are developing back home.

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The exchange of ideas between people living in different stages is ever so more important in a time when climate activism practices have been put into question and public support for the cause has been eroded by extremist narratives. The community aspect of the bootcamp plays an important role on the resilience of these young citizens – the idea of sorority, that you are not fighting your fight alone – motivates them to remain involved and to press forward with their convictions. While Marit shares that she felt that the group dynamic in the bootcamp was one of the things that impacted her the most “They understand you”, Darragh revealed that Slí, the NGO promoting the Irish YACC, plays a central role in his involvement in the climate action. “They are such an inspiring team that really help lift you up, and we all lift each other up, it's a real sense of community. They're funny, they're witty, they're inspirational. They sit with you if you get low, they listen… It's almost like family, I think it's the way to describe it.” Hopefully, that connection can remain after the bootcamp, since for Livia, a young activist from Italy, it is important to “continue speaking about the issues and [to feel] that we’re not alone. When we feel down about our actions not working, we can actively ask for ideas”.

She continues to open up on how it is sometimes disheartening to convince people that climate change is an issue, mainly due to the opposite narrative propagated by their national government: “if you try to tell them [general population] that there is a problem, they say that the government says there is no problem”. The bootcamp is therefore an important opportunity to learn how to counter these narratives: “they provided me with amazing tools and knowledge concerning climate change, especially participatory tools (…) it’s not about just talking – we also want to take action, we want to make it happen”.

The basis of the work revolved around design thinking methodologies that could frame all the challenges faced by every person, dissect open the identified problems, and nurture an efficient, targeted and innovative discussion session. The goal, obviously, was to generate creative solutions that could be taken back home and presented to the community and the local authorities.

Putting talk into practice, no problem is small enough to be ignored, and no solution is too ridiculous to be discarded. The collective intelligence is brought into stage to analyse all the assumptions and suggest potential resolutions. This, explains Marit, helps them develop their initial ideas and find the best way to approach a solution.

Additionally, as Darragh puts, the experience also brings an important reflection on what our own place is in this journey: “[the biggest learning] was my self-discovery – learning what I like and what I don’t like, how I work with people, the self-growth”. This balance between individual and collective is indeed an important part on climate action, as most climate activists start their journey by first addressing their own individual practices and continue to become more involved in the community and to promote collective changes.

Livia shared how her journey followed this tendency: “When I was eight years old, I was in Sicily, and I saw that my favourite beach was full of plastic, and that broke my heart. [later], in university, I was pessimistic. I didn’t really believe that individual actions could have an impact. I started changing small things in my daily life.” However, the community belonging motivated her to become more involved: “There was a Fridays for Future group where I studied, so I also started to gather every Friday.”

“I think there are different levels of engagement and they said that if you are at a low level, you can start with yourself. And then slowly you can have a larger impact with more people that are involved.”

Everyone leaves the bootcamp with clear ideas on what they would like their future to look like. In the last day, the group shared the newspaper headlines that they would like to read in a decade or two: the return of ice, more forest, number of wild animals growing, clean plastic free oceans, ecosystems thriving in cities, public transportation usage higher than ever, renewable clean energy, climate change is stopped, global warming is reversed.

These ideas shape the kind of sustainable future that young people today are working on achieving, but the bootcamp also encourages practical actions in the present. Marit wants to do “something with local authorities to make the city better and greener”, while Darragh is going to focus on “speaking to those who have different views, because then we can learn from them and understand where they're coming from”.