Missing Voices in Australian Climate Education
Migrant Youth for Climate Justice: Whose Voices Count in Climate Education?
Authors: Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro and Dr Liberty de Rivera
Nearly half of Australia’s young people are from first or second-generation migrant or refugee backgrounds.1 For many migrant young people, climate change has never been an abstract future problem. It is something affecting their family members, communities and homelands right now. This is especially true for those with connections to the Global South, whose communities and ecosystems are bearing the consequences of climate change more severely, as climate impacts intersect with issues of economic and social disparity.
Migrant young people and their communities carry valuable knowledge about adaptation, resilience, community care and living through socio-environmental change. Their experiences can deepen how young people and educators engage with climate change in an interconnected world and help create more nuanced and meaningful learning opportunities.
Yet migrant and Global South experiences, knowledges and perspectives remain largely absent from climate education in Australia.
At a time when social division, racism and anti-immigration sentiments2 are becoming more visible in many parts of Australian society, including in schools, education spaces have an important role to play. They can be places where different experiences are welcomed, where multiple ways of knowing are valued, and where young people learn that addressing climate change also requires us to think about power, equity and justice.
Learning and Co-creating with Migrant Young People
Our research3 found that migrant young people are already engaging critically with climate justice. They also connect climate change with broader concerns about discrimination, inequality and social justice. They ask not only what is happening to the climate, but also who is affected, whose experiences count and whose futures are being protected.
Their stories, agendas and knowledges challenge deficit narratives that often position migrant young people and their communities as passive victims. Instead, they demonstrate leadership, collective power, creativity and possibility.
On 5 August 2026, we were joined by Mijica Lus to launch a suite of climate justice resources co-created through a research project with migrant young people from diverse Global South and non-Western backgrounds across Australia.
You can access these resources via our new website4, as well as a climate advocacy zine5 and the Education Statement (more on that below).
Between 2025 and 2026, 18 young people aged 18–29 joined us in a process of dialogue, consultation, creative activities and four virtual participatory arts workshops, which led to the development of these resources. Together, we explored ways to share thoughts, feelings, stories and ideas about climate justice in education and advocacy, with the intention of amplifying migrant youth voices and co-creating resources for climate education and advocacy.
Where to From Here?
As well as the resources, we also developed an Education Statement6 that aligns migrant and Global South knowledges and perspectives with the Australian Curriculum (Humanities and Social Sciences [HASS], Years 7–12), proposing five key learning principles linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
These key learning principles encourage educators to:
- Promote accountability and reflexivity by critically examining power and inequality.
- Ensure inclusion without tokenism by meaningfully embedding migrant-led, diverse and Global South perspectives.
- Connect learning to agency and transformative action.
- Recognise racial, cultural and linguistic diversity as strengths through multicultural accessibility.
- Use lived experiences and storytelling respectfully and ethically to build empathy and understanding.
It reminds us that climate change education is not only about environmental change. It is also about people, cultures, histories, stories and the unequal ways climate change is experienced around the world.
The opportunity before us is not simply to diversify climate education, but to create learning environments where all young people can see themselves as knowledge holders, leaders and agents of change in building more just and sustainable futures.
Acknowledgements
We thank our collaborators: Toyo, Nayonika, Mijica, Manpreet, Natasha, Danielle, Kimia, Tanishvel, Yeng, Rosaline, Sama, Aakriti, Laksmi, Anoop and those who chose to remain anonymous.
We also thank Professor Amy Cutter-McKenzie-Knowles and Professor Alexandra Lasczik for their mentorship, as well as Dr Alice Cranney and Dr Lisa Siegel for their support with the resources, as well as Dr Zelmarie Cantillon her research assistance work. We thank the Australian Association for Environmental Education and the SEAE Research Centre for their support in the dissemination of the project outputs. The art and design of many of the resources on the website are done by migrant women. These include Maria Fernanda Pérez Moubayed: Reel design; Natalie Estay Valenzuela: Zine design; Nidhi Bolar: Education Statement design.
- https://myan.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/National-Education-Roundtable-Briefing-Paper-Education-and-students-from-refugee-and-migrant-backgrounds.pdf
↩︎ - https://apan.org.au/resource/anti-palestinian-racismin-australian-schools-report/
↩︎ - https://migrantyouthforclimatejustice.my.canva.site/migrant-youth-website
↩︎ - https://migrantyouthforclimatejustice.my.canva.site/migrant-youth-website
↩︎ - https://heyzine.com/flip-book/05ca68271c.html
↩︎ - https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/esploro/outputs/report/991013390051802368 ↩︎