Kenya: Student Perspectives On Climate Change

Environment   Aug 30, 2017 by Melissa Joe

Different aspects and situations in life determine how different students all over the world view the issue that is climate change.

Social class: Sadly, the social class a student belongs to is a great influence on how the student perceives climate change. A good example would be the perspective of a student belonging to a low income family that depends on farming as a source of livelihood. Since his /her family is dependent on their produce to sustain themselves, bad weather (due to climate change e.g. floods) would directly affect their crops and in turn affect them. In contrast, a student belonging to a high class family would not be affected by such a thing as they would probably eat out regularly, or even fail to know what goes into the preparation of a meal.

Culture: This is another key factor that influences how students view climate change. Take one from a nomadic community as an example. Moving from one place to another in search of prosperous land is their way of life. This means that whenever their semipermanent homes are struck with drought or floods (due to climate change) they are forced to relocate. Such a student would most likely view climate change more severely than another who does not live his/her kind of life, merely because he/she experiences it first hand.

Country: I live in a developing country and have come to realize that my view on climate change as well as that of the students in my country differ from the views of those in developed countries. A county's economy is a great contributor to this in the sense that, developed countries can deal with issues of climate change with much more ease compared to developing countries as their GDP is definitely higher. Developing countries will most likely have to sacrifice certain sectors e.g. healthcare or education in order to combat climate change. Therefore, students in these countries are most likely to be impacted directly through this and would definitely see climate change as a huge issue. As for students in developed countries who don't directly suffer the effects of climate change, their view won't be as serious.

"Thanks to our ancestral knowledge and learning, indigenous peoples have had the capacity to adapt to the various pressures and to the historical environmental and socioeconomic changes. This, we have knowledge, technologies and capacities to adapt to changing environments and could contribute to mitigation and adaptation to climate change." These words were proclaimed by a member of a certain indigenous group. I personally find this perspective very negative. This is because the author of the statement seems to be comfortable with climate change to the extent of being prepared to adapt to it. This should not be the case! Rather, he/she should be uneasy (the need for change only arises when one fells uncomfortable) especially because his/her community is highly at risk of the dangers that come with climate change. Will this kind of mindset get us anywhere? Absolutely not!

My personal perspective on climate change can be described by the picture below due to the fact that my family has depended on farming for decades to provide food for ourselves.A few years back, we never went shopping for produce that we could grow on our farms. Most of the food we ate, we grew. Climate change has impacted us greatly because we are now forced to buy edibles. We inconviniently spend much more money at supermarkets on groceries, which brings out the expression in the image. Climate change increases the cost of living , is expensive, and is cheaper to simply combat it.

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