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Climate change dominates public environmental discourse — and for good reason. But the biodiversity crisis is equally urgent, equally human-caused, and in some respects more immediately threatening to human wellbeing. Youth work has been slow to engage with it. This is a mistake worth correcting.
The Scale of the Crisis
The 2019 Global Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) — the most comprehensive review of its kind — found that around one million animal and plant species are currently threatened with extinction, more than at any previous point in human history. Global wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69% since 1970, according to WWF's Living Planet Index.
These are not just ecological statistics. Biodiversity underpins the ecosystem services on which human civilisation depends: pollination of food crops, freshwater purification, flood regulation, climate regulation, soil formation, disease control. The biodiversity crisis is a human crisis — and young people will live through its consequences.
Why Youth Work Has Been Slow to Engage
Several factors have kept biodiversity off the youth work agenda. The climate crisis is easier to communicate — higher temperatures, extreme weather, melting ice caps. Biodiversity is harder to visualise and harder to connect to daily life for urban young people. The policy frameworks are also less developed — the Global Biodiversity Framework (Kunming-Montreal), adopted in 2022, is less established than the Paris Agreement in public consciousness.
You cannot care about something you do not know. Most young people in European cities have almost no contact with natural systems. Youth work that creates that contact — even briefly, even locally — plants seeds that can grow into something much larger.
Practical Ways to Integrate Biodiversity
- Urban nature exploration: guided walks, citizen science activities, and biodiversity surveys in urban green spaces — these can happen anywhere and require minimal resources
- Nature-based facilitation: running workshops outdoors, using natural materials, creating activities that require participants to pay attention to living systems
- iNaturalist and citizen science: apps that allow young people to contribute to real scientific data about local species create a sense of meaningful contribution
- Connection to food systems: exploring where food comes from, how it is produced, and what industrial agriculture does to biodiversity — this connects abstract issues to daily life
- Policy literacy: helping young people understand the EU Biodiversity Strategy, the Global Biodiversity Framework, and what they demand of governments
The Deeper Case
Beyond the practical arguments, there is a deeper case for integrating biodiversity into youth work. Contact with nature has well-documented benefits for young people's mental health, attention, and sense of connection to something larger than themselves. In a world where young people are increasingly anxious, overwhelmed, and disconnected — from each other and from the living systems they are part of — this matters. Nature is not just an environmental issue. It is a wellbeing issue. And wellbeing is what youth work is for.