Climate change has been a topic approached with fear or uncertainty. Whether people believe that climate change is bringing about the end of time and something must be done now or that climate change is a big, conspiratorial plot, most of the world can admit that something bad is happening.
Sea levels are rising at rates never seen before, surface level temperatures are skyrocketing, and government organizations seem as if they are simply unable to reach a compromise about healthier habits that we could all be undertaking for the sake of the Earth.

The U.S. Environmental Protective Agency just revoked its claim that greenhouse gases are dangerous to both environmental and public health,

despite its years of valiantly fighting against it. It may look bleak for us going forward, but, believe it or not, there is more hope for climate control than there ever have been.

Before we talk about hope, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists predicted in 2025 that we are closer to global destruction than we have ever been. Every year, they hold a reveal of their Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical clock that predicts when the Earth will pass the point of no return and become inhabitable. In January 2026, they predicted that we were 85 seconds away from “midnight” with considerations of nuclear risk, disruptive technologies, and climate change.

This makes complete sense. After the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, the global temperature was supposed to raise about 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2043, but now that point is projected to be reached by 2029.

The problem is that simply too many countries rely on industries that require environmentally detrimental tactics, and a switch would be too drastic and risky for them. Such a switch would take years and an immense amount of cooperation and innovation.
In conversations about climate change, it is also important to understand the cultural and political differences that define each country; for many developing countries, they cannot afford to take the extra steps to enforce climate positivity. They have to put the survival and needs of their citizens first. The Conference of the Parties, a climate conference sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held its 30th anniversary conference last winter in Brazil. An agreement about global fossil fuel usage was never met, despite that being its primary goal.

All of these topics cause fear and worry among people across the world. This idea is known as climate anxiety. Whether people are posting videos and statistics about the recent rises in wildfires in Australia and California or videos about the ice in Antarctica melting, many of us have seen some formats of climate-sensitive media online.

While all of these topics are despairing, it is important that we look at things from a different angle. Things may look bleak now, and change may seem far away, but our generation, the next generation in line to control global politics and climate responsibility, has been proven to be the generation that cares the most about these issues.

Multiple platforms have conducted similar surveys that concluded that young people believe that climate change is “dooming” humanity and its future.
GlobeScan, a website dedicated to sustainability and shaping a better planet, conducted a survey which concluded that almost half of Gen Z experience the effects of climate change. If over half of us feel so strongly about the effects of climate change that we say it is dooming humanity, then clearly, we want changes to be made.

Organizations like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists do not do things like the Doomsday Clock just to scare us or work up our emotions; they present a warning to us. Our generation has clearly been taking this warning seriously. Young people have joined youth organizations across the world to learn more about the changing climate and what individual actions to take to limit environmental harm.

The UNESCO Climate Action Network for Youth has worked with thousands of young people worldwide to make their voices heard.
In our own backyard, there are the Pittsburgh Youth for Climate Action sponsored by Communitopia and the Youth Climate Advocacy Committee sponsored by Phipps that unite young people with a common concern for the world around them.

Even in Shaler, the Sustainability Club educates students about healthier habits for the Earth and gives them the opportunity to participate in hands-on activities to observe how even the smallest actions can make differences within our own community.

One of the most important factors in why young people feel so strongly about climate change is that they feel unheard and helpless in this whole situation. Much of present-day youth feels like they do not have the proper platform to express their concerns about the climate, and they are concerned that the older generations running the world right now are preparing them for a bleak future. Pew Research Center concluded that over 70% of American youth have extreme concerns about climate change affecting their futures.

Sometimes it is so easy to get lost in all of the negativities going on in the world that we ignore some of the positives, no matter how insignificant they may seem. The Forest Stewardship Council has a fine list of global actions taken in 2025 to combat climate change and how it has positively impacted people around the world.

Our generation promises more hope towards the future of the climate than the Earth has ever seen. We want to take action, and when our voices can finally be heard on a global platform, there is hope for change. This hope is not a promise that the Earth will be miraculously and immediately relieved of all climate struggles within our lifetimes, but it is a promise for us to try and unite against climate change as much as we can.