Global youth climate communication

This project explores young people’s perceptions of, communication about, and engagement with climate change as a global crisis in Hong Kong and Melbourne from a comparative approach. To move beyond the nation-centric and Western-centric focus that dominates the field of climate change communication, Dr Wendi Li experiments with a global city comparison as a practice of methodological cosmopolitanism, which provides a new lens of comparison by highlighting globalised commonalities and cultural differences of climate perceptions and communication experiences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 climate-concerned young adults in Hong Kong and Melbourne (n = 20 in each city), this project specifically investigates the way they construct their own civic identity and form public opinions in times of the climate crisis: ‘global crisis citizenship’ and ‘transplanetary dialogic deliberation’ are conceptualised accordingly to encapsulate these two processes and related practices.

This research has produced Dr Li’s PhD thesis, ‘Global crisis citizenship and deliberation: A comparative study of young generations' climate communication in Hong Kong and Melbourne’, and is leading to an upcoming research monograph entitled, ‘Young people’s climate change communication in Hong Kong and Melbourne: Global crisis, deliberation, and citizenship’ in the Routledge Series in Environmental Communication and Media.

Impact to date

This project has been supported by prestigious scholarship and travel grants from world-leading universities and internationally renowned professional organisations, such as the International Communication Association (ICA), to research and present its outcomes and implications to international audiences from 2019 to 2025. Wendi expects to contribute to future local media engagement and policy-making in climate communication and education.

Future focus

Supported by the Faculty of Arts School of Media Film and Journalism travel grant, Wendi is extending this project into new global city contexts to compare young people’s climate change communication in Shanghai (China) and Kyoto (Japan) in collaboration with Chinese and Japanese experts in environmental and science communication. She is open to and looking forward to more comparative collaboration in the future.