Broadening the Meanings of Youth Climate Activism: A Review of the Literature from Asia

Abstract

It is by now a common trope that youth climate activism has become a ‘global phenomenon’. Yet, it also has significant regional variations. This literature review analyses eighteen academic articles on the topic of youth climate activism in Asia. We found that the literature from Asia overall had ambitions to contextualise and nuance international scholarship on youth climate activism. This was achieved by emphasising social and cultural constructions of youth in different Asian contexts; by exploring inequality-related barriers for young people to enter into climate activism; by emphasising solidarity across classes and ages as a particular aspect of much Asian youth climate activism; and by showcasing the political restrictions in many Asian states, which inhibit (scholarship on) activism. We conclude that Asian avatars of youth climate activism have evolved in response to their distinct social, cultural, and political contexts, and that they challenge not easily transferable concepts such as ‘school strike’ and ‘future generations’. At the end, we offer suggestions for future research, including the need for going beyond desk studies when documenting discrete movements and for conceptualisations of youth climate activism that are inclusive of diverse contexts.

1. Introduction

The Fridays for Future (FFF) school strikes in 2019 were applauded for causing a ‘global’ climate movement, with strikes from New Zealand to India (BBC, 2019). This, in turn, led to an enormous scholarly interest in youth climate activism. The first wave of the youth climate activism literature, largely focused on Western Europe, overwhelmingly sought to understand why young people protest (Neas et al., 2022). Now, however, a ‘counter literature’ has emerged which aims to highlight the challenges for youth climate movements in most of the world—be they political restrictions, ageism, or societal pressures on youth. In this review, we survey the literature particularly from Asia.1 We characterise it as a ‘counter literature’, because it takes the literature about Fridays for Future and similar movements as its point of departure but critiques a seemingly limitless applaud for young climate activists’ agency and self-empowerment. Instead, it focuses on structural restrictions for youth climate activism in most of the world as well as on movement repertoires different from the school strike, such as solidarity with labour unions and ‘environmentalism of the poor’.

To illustrate what we mean by the ‘counter literature’, we refer to the example of Dorji and Flowers (2023) writing on Bhutan. Bhutan is a small Asian country sandwiched between two of the world’s largest CO₂ emitters, China and India, which impacts the melting of Bhutanese glaciers while Bhutan itself is CO₂ negative. So why did young Bhutanese not engage in ‘Fridays for Future’-type protests? Dorji and Flowers (2023) argue that FFF is not a suitable model for climate action in Bhutan for reasons including FFF’s lack of spiritual ecology, which is a common driver for indigenous peoples, and they demonstrate it with the example of a local waste management project based on the philosophy of Vajrayana Buddhism. The ‘counter literature’ is thus a reaction to the mainstream body of scholarship on youth climate activism. It argues, overall, that we should ask how we can encourage the Bhutanese and other youth with experiential and indigenous knowledge to participate in this wave of transnational solidarity. We now turn to introduce the method of the review, then present the themes in the literature, and finally suggest future directions in research.

2. Method and Limitations

The purpose of the literature review was to map what we know about youth climate activism in Asia. The regional focus was chosen to avoid the diffuse category of the ‘Global South’, which does not have clear inclusion or exclusion criteria. Furthermore, a regional focus allows us to offer findings that could be particular to Asia. Because Asia is one of the most climate change-affected continents (Sarkar, 2018; Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 3), it is important to understand its peculiar landscape concerning climate activism with the hope that this investigation can also contribute to research that supports a bottom-up and regional approach in the context of international climate policy making, litigation, and activism.

A Boolean search for academic publications was conducted on 30 April 2025:

(Asia* OR China* OR Japan* OR Vietnam* OR Uzbekistan* OR Indonesia* OR Brunei* OR Azerbaijan* OR Myanmar* OR Laos* OR Cambodia* OR Korea* OR Mongolia* OR Kyrgyzstan* OR Kazakhstan* OR Russia* OR Singapore* OR Tajikistan* OR Thailand* OR Timor-Leste* OR Turkmenistan* OR Taiwan* OR Malaysia* OR Philippines* OR India* OR Bangladesh* OR Bhutan* OR Pakistan* OR Sri Lanka* OR Maldives* OR Nepal* OR Afghanistan*) AND (youth OR child* OR “young people” OR student*) AND (climate OR environment* OR sustainable*) AND (activism OR movement OR activist OR protest*)

The search was conducted on abstracts in peer-reviewed publications in English, through Lund University’s search tool, LUBsearch, which searches within 37 well-known databases of the academic literature. The search returned 241 results. Each publication was scanned by title and, when necessary, by abstract or a full text, with the following selection criteria:

• Young people should be central to the analysis;
• Environmental or climate activism should be central to the analysis;
• An Asian country should be the main, or one of several, countries of focus.

‘Central’ is an important word here, as we used this criterion to avoid studies which only touched upon youth or climate activism. Instead, youth climate activism should be the object of study, so the review would remain focused. We defined ‘climate activism’ broadly by including all studies where the author framed the central object of study as either environmental or climate-related activism. The same goes for the term ‘youth’, which covered an identification by the research paper that those engaged in the activism were ‘young people’ or ‘children’ (although only one of the finally included articles was about ‘child’ activism).2 We decided to use these ‘mainstream’ terms—‘climate’, ‘activism’, ‘youth’, etc.—not with the expectation that they would lead us not to all types of youth engagement with the environment going on in Asia but rather to show how Asia scholars critically respond to a mainstream literature specifically on these terms.

Applying the combination of the three selection criteria led us to twelve articles. Especially the first criterion excluded a large amount of non-youth-led environmental movement literature. Through a similar search on Google Scholar, three articles were added. One article was then found by searching for ‘Bangladesh Fridays for Future’, and we realised the need for adapting the original search with the keyword ‘Fridays for Future’ in addition to each country.3 That search returned a total four results, of which two met to the selection criteria and were included. We therefore read a total of eighteen articles which met the criteria outlined above. The articles about single countries related to India (n = 7), South Korea (n = 3), Malaysia (n = 2), Bhutan (n = 1), Indonesia (n = 1), and Taiwan (n = 1). Comparative articles (n = 3) included the Asian countries Bangladesh (n = 1), India (n = 2), Japan (n = 1), and the Maldives (n = 1).

Some limitations to the search are important to highlight. First of all, we are well aware that youth climate activism happens in several Asian countries not included in the list above, for example, in Vietnam (350.org East Asia, 2019) and Nepal (Amnesty Nepal, 2019). We could not, however, find scholarly work on these movements, and the present article is a survey of scholarly work, not a mapping of movements. Second, we focused on publications in English, which may explain the overrepresentation of studies from India. In the other countries (and in non-elite activist spaces in India), English research publications would require a researcher familiar both with the local language and English, as well as a willingness and access to publish in English-language journals. English would still, however, be the most common language of scholarly publication across diverse Asian contexts. Furthermore, by only including country names in the search, we might have missed articles focused on specific towns or cities, not mentioning the country. Such a search was not possible due to the large number of towns in Asia. However, we presume that most articles would mention the country in the abstract. Finally, the government repression of much (youth- and climate-related, but also general) activism in many Asian countries (see Section 3.5 below) means that research which is in fact about ‘activism’, ‘movement’, ‘protest’, or ‘strike’, as our search looked for, can be hidden under other names. In some cases, youth-led engagement may be framed as ‘community engagement’, ‘nature conservation’, ‘volunteering’, or forms of ‘civic education’. We acknowledge that our approach has excluded the literature that does not identify itself under the umbrella of ‘activism’, but we focused our study on those that did because we otherwise would have had to make our own broad definition and evaluate whether each study’s object of study could be our definition of ‘activism’. Our initial search included studies on, for example, Indian children’s climate fiction and green entrepreneurship in Indonesian colleges, and—in addition to being a review study of a very large magnitude—including all these types would be too idiosyncratic a body of literature to coherently review. Furthermore, it was not possible to generate an exhaustive and rigorous list of all such alternative terms. We therefore remained focused on what was studied as activism, protest, or movement, but recognising this as a limitation, the findings that were analysed in this paper further helped us understand why youth in a given country may be unable to participate in climate ‘activism’. We argue that this, in itself, is a key contribution of the emerging branch of youth climate activism scholarship that seeks to broaden the meanings of youth climate activism and challenge dominant narratives.

Overall, we characterise our included studies more as an intervention by Asia scholars into ‘international’ scholarship on youth climate activism (i.e., a counter literature), rather than a reflection of all the types of youth climate engagements transpiring in Asia. The eighteen included articles were read in depth to determine common themes and findings across the literature, as presented below.

3. Themes in the Literature

‘[I]n Dhaka [Bangladesh], young people were almost four times less likely (…) to protest than young Christchurch [New Zealand] residents’, conclude Prendergast et al. (2021, p. 9) in their comparative study of climate strikers across seven cities globally. Our literature review shows that scholarship about youth climate activism in Asia is largely characterised by attempts to explain such discrepancies. In this section, we present four themes from the literature review, all somehow related to challenges and alternative repertoires for youth climate activism in Asia. First, most of the literature begins with an acknowledgment that the global Fridays for Future strikes did spark a new interest in youth climate activism in the concerned Asian countries (Section 3.1). Second, some studies argue that the understanding of ‘youth’, which much European youth climate activism is based on, is either significantly different or non-existent in the studied contexts (Section 3.2). Third, where youth climate activism does exist in Asia, there are—as elsewhere—class-related barriers for young people to participate (Section 3.3). Fourth, many of the young people engaged in climate activism in Asia consider solidarity and social justice as integral to their climate activism (Section 3.4). And finally, because of the fact that many Asian countries are not full democracies, the political possibilities for activism in general are restricted, which either leads to chilling effects on youth climate activism, an absence of ‘activism’ framings, and/or an absence of scholarly literature engaging with this topic (Section 3.5).

3.1. The Fridays for Future Momentum

Most of the reviewed articles begin with the ‘Friday for Future momentum’: the wave of global school strikes in 2019 and their manifestations across Asia. For example, the Indian avatars consist of Fridays for Future India and its regional chapters but also of other groups which were created around the same time. Datta (2024), for instance, analyses social media posts from the groups Yugma, There is No Earth B, Let India Breathe, and Climate Front India in addition to various Fridays for Future chapters. Some Indian studies focus exclusively on Fridays for Future (Prendergast et al., 2021; Roy, 2023; Wilf et al., 2024) and some broadly on youth climate activism in India in the 2019–2020 period (Khan et al., 2021; Titzmann, 2023). In the South Korean context, the emergence of Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) represents a key turning point in the country’s climate activism landscape which had been stagnant with limited youth participation (K. Y. Choi, 2023). In the case of Malaysia, Klima Action Malaysia (KAMY) was founded a few months after the global FFF strike and leads youth-driven climate advocacy with their focus on climate issues unique to Malaysia, for example, thick haze caused by forest fires linked to palm oil cultivation (Arnez, 2022). Young Indonesians were also inspired by the rise of the new wave of climate activism, leading to the creation of the Fridays for Future Indonesia and Extinction Rebellion chapter across 15 cities (Tomsa, 2025). Bangladesh seemed to be less active but still staged protests in the name of Fridays for Future in 2019 (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 3).

In the mentioned contexts, the global interconnectedness of Fridays for Future embodied a new type of youth climate activism with an infectious energy that sparked localised youth climate movements (Arnez, 2022; K. Y. Choi, 2023; Roy, 2023; Titzmann, 2023; Datta, 2024). However, one Indian scholar, who herself is a climate activist, problematises the highly lauded ‘globalness’ of Fridays for Future, arguing that it is not necessarily reflexive of practice. By comparing media coverage and Friday for Future India’s official Instagram page with the Friday for Future’s international website, she shows a large discrepancy:

According to the [international] website, in September 2019, cities like Nur Sarai mobilised 1750 people, Pelling mobilised 350 people, Nagaon 260 people, Mahbubnagar 350 people, Kolhapur 6700 people, Karnal 300 people and the list goes on. All these cities particularly have never had a single FFF chapter or even a climate strike, let alone those many people joining the climate strike.

(Datta, 2024, p. 8)

Here, Datta’s study is an important reminder of rigorous research going beyond FFF websites in order to establish the magnitude of movements.

Regarding Bhutan, Japan, Maldives, and Taiwan, the point of departure in the reviewed studies was instead to ask why there had not been Fridays for Future mobilisations in these countries. According to Dorji and Flowers (2023), the absence of Fridays for Futures in Bhutan is not due to youth’s passivity or political repression, but it rather implies that FFF is not suitable for the only carbon-negative nation with a young democracy and political economy that does not rely on extractive industries and mass consumption, unlike the countries where the Fridays for Future movement is strong. The authors argue that FFF’s ‘secular’ nature is not compatible with the spiritual ecology of Bhutan (understood as a combination of both Buddhist values and indigenous epistemologies of animism), which guides Bhutan’s understanding of climate action and climate education. Japan, a very different example, was highlighted in a comparative study as a place where the government was explicitly hostile towards youth climate protests, and therefore it was near-impossible to identify any youth climate activists (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 6). The Maldivian study framed youth environmental engagement not through global protest movements but focused on Kulhudhuffushi, an island famous for its mangroves, where young people’s environmental awareness was nurtured while growing up and cultivated deeply through youth leadership initiatives and local NGOs, which catalysed their participation in a national protest against the Mangrove destruction in 2018 (Jaufar, 2021). For the context of Taiwan, Chang (2022) highlights the limited scale of youth-led climate mobilisation as a reflection of regional challenges in organising collective climate action.

We thus see a large diversity in the extent to which youth from different Asian countries mobilised as part of the Fridays for Future momentum. While some countries had very active movements, covered by a relatively large number of research articles, authors writing on other countries emphasised the difficulty of transposing a Friday for Future structure and protest repertoire into their context. Many countries were highlighted as places where strikes were met with hostility by the government (see also Section 3.5 below), a fact which we presume also characterises many of the countries not represented in this literature review. We now turn to exploring why social and cultural constructions of youth might be explanations for the lack of resonance of Fridays for Future in some Asian countries.

3.2. The Social and Cultural Construction of Youth

It is well known that ‘youth’ in itself is a relatively recent social and cultural construct (Savage, 2007). In the mainstream climate activism context, youth is often understood as a life stage in which one has more ‘biographical and structural availability’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 1). In other words, a period of years after a protected childhood and before the responsibilities of adulthood lends itself easily to activism. The reviewed literature on Asia, however, challenges this perception of youth by highlighting societal and cultural pressures on young people, and youth and studenthood as an age of obedience and respect for elders rather than only freedom to be disobedient.

Chang (2022) argues that ‘culture’ is an under-researched subject in the context of the climate movement. In Taiwan, deeply ingrained age hierarchies and a weak cultural and institutional foundation for children’s rights together suppress youth entitlement, Chang argues. For example, a student group faced the challenge where a teacher instructed them to avoid the word ‘strike’ from all printed materials, considering it ‘too sensitive’. According to Chang, teachers’ ability to control children’s actions sprouts from the cultural context of ‘diplomaism’ in Asian countries, where societal focus on academic achievement suppresses political expression among youth. A student in Chang’s study said that ‘the education system in Taiwan is that you get a deduction in performance scores if you are absent from class’, to which Chang (2022, p. 12) comments that ‘[a]bsence from class is often regarded as an act of disobedience by teachers, entailing adultism and discrimination against these young climate activists, regardless of the justification for their cause’. To avoid academic repercussions of disrupting school attendance, students adopted the strategy of organising climate protests within the school premises and collaborated with pro-environment teachers (Chang, 2022). By doing so, they targeted the local students and teachers to raise awareness on environmental issues, as opposed to the FFF’s street protests targeting politicians to take actions. This phenomenon, Chang argues, is common in East Asian countries and is rooted in Confucian philosophy of discipline and self-governance. Dorji and Flowers (2023) interpret Chang’s article as evidence that young people in East Asia have been adapting climate activism to fit in their local cultural and educational contexts through less confrontational methods like speeches instead of replicating the model of ‘school strikes’.

In the Indian context, it was also found that fear of families, who pressure young people to not be part of climate movements, was a detracting factor for entering youth climate activism (Roy, 2023; Wilf et al., 2024). Walker (2020, p. 2) has a similar observation, however not focused on pressure for academic achievement but rather on the recognised privilege of being able to go to school:

…whilst striking from school is a highly symbolic activity in countries where it is the norm for young people to be in school, not all young people—particularly those in contexts where access to education is a privilege of their generation—have the relative luxury of being able to miss school, or even of being in school.

Similarly, Kang and Orsini (2023) argue that most young people in South Korea are more concerned about their immediate future in terms of university exams or job opportunities than environmental concerns.

Intergenerational relations and duties also seem to be important for what it means to be ‘young’ in the studied Asian contexts. For instance, in studies on both Maldives (Jaufar, 2021) and India (Ravi, 2022), young people highlighted their grandparents as a primary source of fostering environmental values. Furthermore, where young people did engage in climate activism, it was not necessarily in an exclusively ‘young’ space. For instance, Titzmann (2023, p. 15) observed that Fridays for Future Mumbai was ‘truly diverse in the age of participants (ranging from 14 to 78 years)’. Khan et al. (2021) similarly suggest that climate protesters who were active as a result of the Fridays for Future momentum in India could be much older than what we generally would consider as ‘youth’. Furthermore, a study on South Korea highlighted how young people exhibited sympathy with older generations who had struggled for industrial development and better standards of living (K. Y. Choi, 2023).

Several articles outright rejected age-based categorisations. The study on Bhutan (Dorji & Flowers, 2023) questioned why Fridays for Future and similar movements focused so much on age differences, when the authors regarded regional differences to be of larger importance. Two articles highlight that the youth climate movement in South Korea rejects being associated with ‘mirae-sedae’ (‘future generations’), which they consider a patronising term, marginalising young people from political discourse by portraying them as too immature, in the same category of the practice of ‘youth washing’ (K. Y. Choi, 2023; Kang & Orsini, 2023). In response, South Korean school strikers resist adultist structures not by positioning themselves against adults but rather by arguing that age-based division was unjustified. Their rejection of the age-based perspective is particularly evident in how a school activist declined to disclose her age, perceiving the question as patronising (K. Y. Choi, 2023). A too strong focus on age, South Korean youth climate organisations argued, also manifested itself in the difficulties they had in collaboration not just with the government but also with the conventional environmental organisations, as expressed here by a student climate activist (Kang & Orsini, 2023, p. 10):

…it is a little difficult to collaborate with conventional environmental organisations but there is common sense among us [youth] that ‘we should try.’ We sometimes feel that young people are secondary participants when we work with them. Such attitude towards youth cannot only be found in the governmental institutes or the National Assembly, but also in civil society.

These words capture the broader pattern of adult-centric society that continues to shape youth activism in South Korea.

Similarly, Faiesall et al. (2023) state that youth in Malaysia have been navigating systems dominated by lobby groups and rigid ideological interests that obstruct youth participation in high-level decision-making processes, specifically concerning climate action. In spite of that, Arnez (2022) identifies KAMY influencing national and international discourse by advocating against deforestation and construction of artificial islands, including promoting the interest of the indigenous group of Orang Asli at COP26. KAMY has also been actively challenging local understanding of older persons as primary political actors by pointing out that their organisation comprises 70% women members, and 80% of the members are below the age of 25. This is in contrast to the Kristang community being typically limited to conventional male leadership without any specific focus on youth engagement. Arnez (2022) stresses that these are the ways youth have been restructuring cultural norms related to youth and women in Malaysian society, from apolitical actors to agents of change.

Licypriya Kangujam, a nine-year-old activist from India, in her interview with Pandey (2021) considers her age not as a limitation but a source of strength in her advocacy journey. Despite persistent ageist remarks that she is ‘too young’ to engage in activism, she challenges these perceptions: ‘I am proof that age doesn’t matter to make a difference. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. I’m a young girl. I’m strong, smart, intelligent, and brave’ (Pandey, 2021, p. 87). Licypriya’s point is more resonant with the mainstream view in youth climate activism that young people have agency and power because of their age. She does, however, point out the consequences of speaking against political leadership in the form of online threats, abuse and cyberbullying, which is a reflection of a larger problem of structural silencing of youth voices (Pandey, 2021). Her argument to promote climate education is also based on distrust towards adult leadership in addressing the climate crisis, and, hence, children’s education is an important step to catalyse change within their families and communities according to her (Pandey, 2021).

This section has shown that ‘youth’ is a category deeply dependent on social and cultural constructions, leading to very varied experiences of what ‘youth’ should and can do in different contexts, including whether it is appropriate or possible for young people to pursue climate activism. Prendergast et al.’s comparative analysis of Fridays for Future strikes in seven cities arrive at the conclusion that, ‘[i]n Christchurch [New Zealand], more youth strikers felt climate change was a serious problem than young protestors in Makhanda [South Africa], Dhaka [Bangladesh], New Delhi [India], and São Paulo [Brazil] which is surprising given these cities are amongst the most exposed in a changing climate’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 14). But if we consider the social position of youth in these places, it is perhaps not all that surprising.

3.3. Inequalities in Activism

The complex relations between class and youth climate activism were touched upon in most studies, but with varied depth and explanations. Several studies mentioned as a general observation that youth climate activists were urban-based and middle class (and in the case of India, middle to upper caste) (for example, S. Y. Choi, 2023; Titzmann, 2023; Datta, 2024). Writing from the personal experience of being an Indian youth climate activist, Datta (2024, pp. 18–19) suggests, in line with the argument from Walker (2020) above, a reason for the privileged status of the climate activists who joined the Fridays for Future strikes in particular:

The Fridays For Future core idea of skipping school to join climate strikes on Fridays remains a fundamentally alien one to masses of school children in the Indian context. (…) skipping school is viewed as a tactic that privileged private school-educated, urban-based children can engage in. Secondly, climate change in the way it is contextualised currently does not feature in the top priorities of children, whose priorities might have to do with more material needs such as food security, quality schooling, and future employment opportunities among others. The majority of the school children attending climate strikes in 2019 in Delhi, were sent in delegations by their schools. Therefore, as soon as schools stopped sending children for these strikes, the participation of school children in particular also sharply declined.

Prendergast et al. (2021) similarly highlight that urgent livelihood issues can preclude activist engagement. Based on comparing survey results, they concluded that ‘in comparison to Christchurch, young people in Dhaka, Makhanda, New Delhi, and São Paulo reported significantly lower scores when asked whether they felt climate change was a serious problem’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 10). They write that local researchers who helped them in their survey

suggested that while young people may see the climate crisis as a serious problem, they may frame their experiences in ways that differ from dominant, international climate narratives or they face other urgent, pressing local concerns that have occupied their focus.

(Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 14)

One of the few studies that had their point of departure in the question of class inequalities was Khan et al.’s (2021). They investigated whether ‘climate action via digital means could enable less privileged groups to join movements that challenge existing social hierarchies’ (Khan et al., 2021, p. 518). Analysing Twitter networks of two cohorts of climate protesters—one from Bengaluru and one from Delhi—they conclude that the Delhi cohort was more affluent. Twitter has, in Delhi, they argue, ‘largely become an exclusive space for the affluent, anglophone class rather than a public sphere engaged with the concerns of working class youth’ (Khan et al., 2021, p. 522). In Bengaluru, by contrast, online campaigns

had strong connections with local working class youth (for instance, with local NGOs and communities engaged in waste-recycling). A crucial factor here was the use of hashtags and slogans that relied on the regional languages rather than English, a trend that was also evident in the way these groups reached out to local Kannada speakers.

(Khan et al., 2021, p. 521)

A Malaysian study (Faiesall et al., 2023) similarly highlighted the implicit class division associated with digital climate activism: while social media is an accessible space for youth-oriented climate discourse, it also reinforces existing inequalities due to the digital divide. This was also discussed in the Indian context where much youth climate activism was restricted to urban English-speaking youth with internet-browsing skills (Titzmann, 2023). These conclusions are in line with the Malaysian study by Arnez (2022), which stressed the importance of social media in climate literacy, particularly Twitter and Instagram, as it is used by KAMY in simplifying complex environmental issues through engaging infographics while also drawing attention to vulnerable communities affected by development projects. Jaufar (2021) similarly argued that digital advocacy helped reaching isolated islands in campaigns against mangrove destructions.

Another issue that impacts youth engagement in climate issues is whether one lives at the frontline of climate change or as privileged youth in urban centres. Licypriya Kangujam, for instance, the nine-year old Indian activist, is from Northeast India, which is highly affected by floods (Pandey, 2021). She mentioned that her early experiences of natural disasters motivated her to pursue climate action.

The above are some examples indicating that the literature is underdeveloped as to the relations between class and participation in youth climate activism. Most studies suggested that young people who live below middle class are not in a position to consider climate change a pressing issue and that those who protest are therefore primarily a privileged class of youth—such as India’s Delhi-based middle class climate activism or South Korea’s urban veganism. Others, however, highlighted the opposite, namely that that exposure to climate change events in remote and/or disadvantaged areas would be a factor positively related with involvement in climate activism, such as mangrove protection in islands of the Maldives. These few studies are far from enough to conclude any correlation between class and youth climate activism, but the interest in the topic by several scholars in diverse contexts suggests that the issue deserves further exploration.

3.4. Solidarity and Social Justice as Integral to Youth Climate Activism

A cross-cutting theme in much of the reviewed literature was that young climate activists were acutely aware of class divides and aspired for solidarity with other groups—young or old—that worked on social justice and environmental issues. As captured by Indian climate activist Disha Ravi (2022, p. 5):

Climate discourse in India has two polarizing ends. The climate crisis is seen as a problem of the urban elite, one that they can afford to concern themselves with because they’re bored and have nothing better to do. (…) who think it’s cool to study it in school and to go vegan for sustainability. But it’s also seen as a problem of farmers and the indigenous people of India who will have their land stolen and be looted (…). It’s always seen as these two polarizing ends, which is something we’ve been trying to change because there are a lot of people in the middle. Quite literally, everybody is impacted by this.

In India, there seemed to be a gulf between ‘climate activism’ and ‘environmental activism’, and while we can—as Ravi does—theoretically argue that it is all part of the same movement, in practice they remain separate. Ravi’s viewpoint is representative of a common theme across the reviewed literature: despite—or perhaps because of—the urban, middle-class demographic of youth climate protesters, they aspire for more solidarity with other, less privileged, environmental groups. Yet, much of the literature on India points to a failure in engaging existing unions and environmental movements (Datta, 2024; Ravi, 2022; Titzmann, 2023; Wilf et al., 2024).

In India, the underlying reasons for aspiring solidarity is not only a wish to cross class lines, but also an admiration and recognition of the historical environmental movements in India. Youth climate activism is argued to be ‘embedded in long standing local traditions of environmental concern’ (Titzmann, 2023, p. 2). Datta (2024) even begins her study of youth climate activists’ social media framings with an account of how it represents a break from the ‘environmentalism of the poor’. With this term, she refers to the argument presented by Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) that environmental struggles in India have largely been conflicts ‘over the control of, usage of and rights to common natural resources’ (Datta, 2024, p. 6). Movements like Chipko4 and Narmada Bachao Andolan5 seem to embody a kind of ‘original’ and ‘ideal’ climate movement to contemporary activists, which they strive to be associated with. In Titzmann’s (2023, p. 5) interviews, ‘[y]oung activists particularly cite these two movements as inspirational models for their own contemporary activism’. Similarly, when Datta (2024, p. 5) describes the ‘disappointing’ and ‘discouraging’ turnout in contemporary climate movements, she underlines the importance of comparing them to the success of earlier Indian movements rather than only to European youth climate activism:

The maximum number of people at a strike in a city has never breached the 3000–4000 mark. If one compares the number of people mobilised for climate strikes in India to European countries, it is a disappointing figure. But, more importantly, it’s a particularly discouraging figure if I compare it to earlier environmental movements in India such as the iconic Silent Valley Movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Chipko Movement and regional uprisings against polluting and unjust developmental projects or factories.

These historical environmental movements were, in Datta’s (2024, p. 2) words, ‘led by marginalised rural populations such as peasants, fisherfolk, and indigenous communities who were directly dependent on natural resources’—and thus very different from the urban, middle-class demographic of youth climate activism.

Khan et al.’s study aimed specifically at understanding solidarity between classes within the climate strikes in 2019. One of their significant findings was a difference between Bengaluru-based and Delhi-based activists, where the former ‘were keen to build inter-group solidarity and a commitment to social justice rather than amplify messages about environmental change as was often the case in Delhi’ (Khan et al., 2021, p. 522).

An argument in some studies was that the more localised issues are, the more potential there was to engage across classes. It was indeed, argues Titzmann (2023, p. 18), when local concerns were raised, in that it ‘facilitated an alliance of activists that transcends age and gender and has brought together very diverse people’. Similar findings came out from Khan et al.’s (2021) study of Bengaluru activists’ class solidarity. Datta (2024, pp. 14–15) highlights the example of Fridays for Future Pune, which ‘impressively’ mobilised 5000 people for a protest against the Mula Mutha Riverfront Development—a mobilisation that involved ‘Gandhian environmentalism and methods6 (…) from earlier environmental movements’, even using the ‘Chipko Andolan’s tactic of hugging trees to indicate their perseverance in a bid to not let these trees be cut down for the River Front Development (RFD) project’. Some protesters were also fasting to save the river. These ‘traditional’ protests methods were combined with ‘using art to engage with young people, writing competitions and organising Global Climate Strikes with clear demands for saving the Mula Mutha River’, leading Datta (2024, p. 15) to call Fridays for Future Pune ‘the only youth-led climate action group which has managed to leverage public memory of iconic methods of protest in earlier environmental movements to frame the issue and motivate people to join the struggle against the RFD project’. Other youth climate movements in India, she argues, are inspired by Greta rather than Gandhi, ‘focusing on intergenerational equity, the role of climate science and pushing for national climate policies’ (Datta, 2024, p. 7).

In South Korea, K. Y. Choi (2023) and S. Y. Choi (2023) highlighted that the adoption of an inclusive, solidarity-based approach that prioritises social equity over intergenerational equity was redefining climate justice discourse. K. Y. Choi (2023, p. 2170) shows how South Korean youth climate activists align with marginalised groups to challenge systematic inequalities:

…Korean youth climate activists put social justice at the forefront of their movement. They band together with delivery riders’ unions, tenants’ rights groups, and aid organizations for the poor, rather than allying with other youth-led advocacy groups. Moreover, they frequently express opposition to the moniker “future generations” and avoid outright confrontation with older generations. The Korean school strikers argue that their climate actions include “everyone”, refusing a narrow focus on generational interests.

Similarly, Kang and Orsini (2023) argue that youth climate activists have been keener on meaningfully collaborating with social movements, particularly labour movements, since energy transitions will displace workers in coal power plants. A specific example is the Korean veganism movement, in which young people form alliances with other activist groups, including animal rights and gender rights, and engage in intersectional coalition-building, which shows their broader engagement with justice movements (S. Y. Choi, 2023).

Evidence of aspiring solidarity and social justice was also found in the studies on Malaysia and Indonesia. According to Arnez (2022), the youth climate movement in Malaysia inspired local communities to stand up and fight for their rights, including the Portuguese Melaka Kristang community contesting the development of artificial islands in Melaka. Tomsa (2025) suggests that the climate justice movement in Indonesia needs to form alliances with local Islamic organisations and labour movements in order to increase their influence on the government and the people.

Summing up, solidarity and social justice were analysed as crucial values in youth climate activism in India, South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Only one study, Faiesall et al. (2023), was more sceptical about the possible on-going shift from youth-specific demands to broader solidarity-based appeals and interpreted it as a strategic response that isolates youth climate activism, making it symbolically visible but politically ineffective. They add that in order to contribute to real policy impact, understanding on the subject of ‘planetary health’ is important—which is missing in countries like Malaysia.

There are thus different ways in which youth engage in climate activism while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of other social concerns, which are often of a local nature. We now turn to the last, but very significant, finding from our review, namely the impact of political restrictions on (scholarship about) youth climate activism.

3.5. Political Restrictions

The countries examined by the literature in this review represent a wide span on the democracy–autocracy scale (Widmalm, 2022), from fully democratic states like South Korea to those exhibiting ‘hybrid’ traits such as restrictions on civil liberties (e.g., Malaysia (Freedom House, 2025b) or suppression of opposition parties (e.g., Bangladesh (Freedom House, 2025a)). Even apparently full democracies like Japan have seen very few people turning up for protests ‘because the government has consistently discouraged youth protests as antisocial behavior’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 3). Many Asian countries are risky places for youth activists in general.7 Thus, fear of political repercussions was a key reported factor in the lack of youth climate activism across all the reviewed literature except for that on South Korea and Bhutan.

To give some examples, Indian youth climate activists have experienced blockages of the websites of several groups, including Fridays for Future India, under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 (also known as the anti-terror law) (Roy, 2023). This is cited in much of the literature on India as a big blow to youth climate activism. Furthermore, the arrest of Fridays for Future India founder Disha Ravi after her tweet in support of farmers’ protests in Delhi in 2021 further impacted the environment for youth climate activism in the country. In their interview study, Wilf et al. (2024, p. 1249) found that

Fear of arrest was one of the most frequently mentioned detracting factors for youths’ climate activism and came up in nearly all the interviews. In general, youth were afraid to strike and engage in other forms of peaceful protest for fear of being arrested. In particular, youth brought up the case of Disha Ravi, which had a significant and negative impact on climate activism across India.

Titzmann (2023, p. 18) similarly argues that Ravi’s arrest in February 2021 ‘led to a change in perception and a stronger linkage of environment and climate with politics in the Indian public perception’. Similarly, Roy (2023, p. 226) argues that the arrest of activists and threats of First Information Reports (FIRs) to the police ‘have brought forward a very serious jolt to these movements, who are at their very nascent stage in India’. Young people also ‘explained that being labeled anti-national was not only dangerous in the short-term; it could affect their long-term career prospects and personal lives’ (Wilf et al., 2024, p. 1249). For these reasons, several authors (Roy, 2023, p. 226; Titzmann, 2023) observe a slowing down in Indian youth climate activism from around 2020 and 2021.

Titzmann (2023), Datta (2024), and Wilf et al. (2024) argue that many young people in India, as a result, have moved to more depoliticised arenas of climate activism, such as clean-up drives. But these do not, as Datta reminds us, ‘address the real problems of waste production and management, of inequal power relations and consumption’ (Datta, quoted in Titzmann, 2023, p. 7). Datta (2024, p. 16) also found a dearth of calls for direct action on the youth climate groups’ Instagram posts that she examined:

Most actions they ask people to engage in can be categorised under low-commitment, individual digital action such as holding a placard with any climate messaging and uploading a picture of oneself with the placard onto their social media, signing petitions, participating in Twitter storms etc.

Wilf et al. (2024) similarly show that young people changed their activism strategies due to government hostility. They moved away from attempting to affect policy and focused instead on tree planting and awareness raising amongst peers. Describing one activist, Wilf et al. (2024, p. 1248) write: ‘her dream was “to do something without taking part in politician [politics]”’.

Not only India was characterised by fear of political repression. Prendergast et al. (2021, p. 14) show that despite the fact that Bangladesh’s capital ‘has had a long tradition of student political protest’, they have very ’low participation in climate strikes’. The authors attribute this to ‘the very recent experience of brutal state retribution against thousands of youth who took part in large-scale student protests about unsafe public transport in 2018, shortly before the climate protests’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 14).

Similarly in Taiwan, young activists employed ‘strategies to spread awareness without holding a “strike”’ (Chang, 2022). Jaufar points out the constraints faced by youth activists in the Maldives due to limited civic space and political sensitivities:

Participants reported that a lot of the meetings and idea generating happened in living rooms of people’s houses. There were spaces in some educational institutions that the participants could access for organising events but this was due to personal contacts within these two institutions and not from an established institutional policy granting access to use their spaces for such purposes.

(Jaufar, 2021, p. 7)

At the time of activism against mangrove destruction, state-imposed restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly were widespread which led some activists to withdraw from any form of activism often under pressure from concerned family members. These constraints trickled down to academic inquiry when Jaufar (2021) could not manage as many interviews as planned, since several youth activists were reluctant to speak to an outsider. However, there was a shift in the political landscape when the government was voted out later and replaced by an administration perceived to be more supportive of democratic civic engagement.

Jaufar’s experiences in the Maldives resonate with other studies. Prendergast et al. met challenges as they intended to conduct a comparative survey of young climate activists in seven global cities, but it turned out to be difficult to include the Japanese city Yokohama, because ‘the Japanese state has positioned protest as an anti-social activity, and discouraged engagement in dissenting behaviors’ (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 14). For ethical reasons, the authors therefore chose to not ask Yokohama youth to disclose their involvement in protests (Prendergast et al., 2021, p. 6).

Tomsa (2025) notes the absence of political support to the younger and more radical activists in Indonesia, a country dedicated to green growth. Given the threats of criminalisation, many young persons are increasingly cautious of identifying as ‘activists’ or to be affiliated with vocal organisations, along with the added fear of impacting educational or professional opportunities. Even moderate environmentalists have now lost access to key decision makers, Tomsa (2025) reports.

Political repression does not only come in the form of restrictions to freedoms of assembly, association, and expression. Such restrictions also intensify when intersecting with minority identities. For example, Wilf et al. (2024, p. 1251) argue that being a Muslim in India can further negatively impact activism:

Angelina described how she received additional, more targeted harassment online (…) because she was Muslim, “people started writing down hate comments that you’re a Muslim, you’re this, you’re this. it makes me feel post less, because I’m trying to speak up but the people who are watching my post, people who are actually, you know, stalking the profiles and everything”. When Angelina received these types of threats, she temporarily reduced her climate activism online.

Finally, political repression may also be the primary reason why some countries did not come up in our literature search at all, in particular China, where the possibilities for activism (and publishing studies about activism) are very limited. Indeed, our review shows that while there has been youth climate activism in Asia, activists in most contexts constantly navigate political repression, and many choose not to engage in activism at all.

4. Conclusions

Reading studies on the topic of youth climate activism in Asia together has allowed us to map a field of the counter literature that complicates mainstream generalisations of youth climate activism. In particular, the reviewed studies highlighted how global and local movements meet and intersect, how social and cultural constructions of youth play out in diverse Asian contexts, how inequalities and solidarity were key themes, and how activism, in general, is subject to political restrictions. These insights are important for youth climate activism studies more broadly, because they show how youth movements evolve with and in response to their social, cultural, and political contexts—both global and domestic. We characterised the literature as a counter literature which argued how some of the concepts around climate activism that originated in the European context are not easily transferable. For example, the idea of ‘school strike’ met resistance in Taiwan, where the act of striking is socially stigmatised, and in India, where many young people and parents considered the privilege of access to schooling more important than this particular activism form, since formal education is still considered a hard-earned privilege. Another example was the context of South Korea where the concept of ‘future generations’ had negative connotations of being minors incapable of representing their own interests. Studies from Bhutan and Taiwan specifically challenged the assumption that lack of FFF movements would be due to lack of youth engagement (Chang, 2022; Dorji & Flowers, 2023). Therefore, the generalisation of FFF as a universal framework to determine youth engagement was, in the reviewed literature, regarded as misleading.

5. Future Directions in Research

Based on this literature review, we suggest the following lines of research we think would expand the field of youth climate activism in important ways. First, most of the studies highlight education in some way or another—either education as a privilege that one will not skip for a strike, education as a space of discipline and restrictions, or education as an untapped potential. Fridays for Future’s original emphasis on ‘listen to the science’ presumes an educated body of young people, and many studies from the Asian context highlights how many young people in Asia do not have access to quality (climate) education.

Second, given that the review showed interesting cross-class and cross-age solidarity ambitions in Asian youth climate activism, we would welcome in-depth studies on this, including more studies which rigorously examine the complex relations between class and youth climate activism in Asia. For example, potential alliances between labour unions and youth climate movements in the transition away from coal, as suggested in one study (Kang & Orsini, 2023), are necessary to explore for the furthering of the climate action cause. In addition, future studies should explore the gendered dimensions of youth climate movements. Several studies in our review briefly mention that a larger proportion of youth climate activists are female (e.g., Arnez 2022; Chang, 2022; S. Y. Choi, 2023; Kang & Orsini, 2023; Titzmann, 2023). However, the reasons behind this gendered participation could be studied in more detail, especially if it is connected to local cultural norms, considering it would be valuable when examined in conjunction with the social construction of youth discussed earlier in this paper.

Third, it will be important to continue to employ a wide range of methods and, in particular, go beyond the desk study, which, as was clear from Datta (2024)’s critical analysis, does not always bring out accuracy in terms of the scale of the movements. Furthermore, given autocratising tendencies in many Asian countries and the subsequent non-digitally traceable types of youth climate activism, discrete and physical interaction-based research will be important, although we understand that it can be difficult.

Fourth, based on our challenges and findings from formulating search terms for the review, we also call for future exploratory review studies that broaden the terminologies commonly used to describe youth climate engagement (for, e.g., ‘activism’ in this paper) and adopt more inclusive framings such as ‘civic participation’, ‘conservation’, and related terms. This would allow for a mapping of youth engagement with environmental issues more broadly, which was beyond the scope of our review.

Fifth, we encourage scholarship on youth climate activism—or the lack of it—in those Asian countries not represented in this review.

Finally, future scholarship and policy work should broaden their understanding of youth climate activism to be more inclusive of youth from diverse contexts. The acts that Asian youth engage in, such as combining climate activism and awareness raising with local social justice activism, navigating political restrictions and socio-cultural ageist assumptions, or challenging ‘school strikes’ or the concept of ‘future generations’, are not exceptions or curious cases but are integral to what youth climate activism is.