By Shaik Imran, 2025 Forest Restoration Steward and co-founder of Prakheti Agrologics

When we talk about climate policy, we often find ourselves referring to frameworks, negotiations and conferences.

Rarely do we pause to ask how climate policy is understood by the people who live with its consequences every day, especially young people.

My team and I set out to change this.

Every year, India hosts a Local Conference of Youth (LCOY) – youth climate events organized by YOUNGO that aim to bring youth voices to UNFCCC processes.

Last year’s conference was hosted by the Indian Youth Climate Network, of which I am a board member. My team and I designed a series of consultations with students in five Indian cities to understand how the climate crisis is already shaping their lives and how they think about climate policy.

These consultations involved over 300 young people, more than 10 partner organizations and many local authorities. We met in school classrooms, where we asked students: what has changed in your landscape? 

Students recalled seeing a pond they once played beside now containing more plastic or algae than fish. A road once shaded by huge trees now feels hotter every year. Farmland at the edge of the city shrinks a little every season. Drains overflow after just 10 minutes of rain.

One student remembered the smell of stagnant water after floods and the suffocating heat that made it difficult to sleep. She also recalled watching a nearby open field become covered with concrete. 

She did not, however, remember learning about the climate crisis at school.

Those stories have stayed with me because they capture something we’ve heard again and again. For many young people, the climate crisis is not something they’re taught. It’s felt, observed and lived long before it’s named.

Between lived reality and policy language

These observations were simple, but they carried a clarity that no dataset could replicate. Young people already know the symptoms of environmental decline – because they live with them.

But when the conversation turned to climate policy, the energy in the room shifted. Many participants hesitated. Some said they had heard of national missions but never understood who they were for. 

Others felt that policies were made for big cities, not for neighborhoods where dust fills the air and drinking water tastes strange. 

A few believed that climate governance belonged to experts, not to children who walk to school past littered canals or young people who spend hours stuck in traffic on their daily commute.

Their understanding of the crisis was rooted in lived experience, but the systems shaping those experiences felt distant. One student put it simply: policy is when something changes for us, not when something is announced.

This gap is precisely what the LCOY India process is designed to address. Rather than treating young people as future stakeholders, it recognizes them as current actors whose experiences must inform inclusive climate policies and systems.

Creating space for marginalized voices

Across India, youth engagement in climate spaces often reflects existing inequalities.

English-speaking students who live in urban areas are more likely to be able to attend events such as climate talks, while children of migrant workers, first-generation learners and youth from peri-urban and rural regions are rarely given these opportunities. 

To ensure diverse representation, we hosted consultations in Mumbai, Jaipur, Patna, Hyderabad and Guwahati. We invited experts from pollution control boards, India’s state climate action cells (which are responsible for developing climate action plans) and other government departments to listen and learn from these conversations. 

Their role was to engage in dialogue and understand how climate impacts are felt on the ground – reversing the flow of knowledge to come from the bottom up. 

One of the most telling parts from the consultations was when students were asked to draw their cities. Rather than neat maps, they drew streets covered in dust with captions like “difficult to breathe during summer.” 

One student drew a canal filled with debris and wrote, “once clean, now unusable.” Another drew a motorbike weaving through traffic with the words “no space to walk safely.” 

A group sketched farmland disappearing under new buildings and labeled it “lost land.” Across cities, one word appeared repeatedly and prominently – water (or rather, the lack thereof).

A girl from the outskirts spoke about insects disappearing near her home. A student from another city noticed that the ground stayed warm long after sunset because trees had been cut down. Someone else described how the soil no longer soaked up rain, causing it to flood instead.

Young people described heat retention, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and poor urban design – all without using any technical language. They show how the climate crisis enters young people’s lives not only through disasters but through everyday discomforts.

Imagining cities that work for people

The LCOY India consultations didn’t stop at identifying problems. Students were encouraged to imagine the cities they wanted to live in, without worrying about feasibility or approval.

They imagined clean and accessible drinking water, streets lined with native trees, safe cycling paths and reliable public transport. 

They drew community farms, seed banks, restored canals, rooftop solar panels and open spaces where children could play safely. They imagined neighborhoods where waste is segregated properly and composting is the norm.

No one drew futuristic techno-fixes. What young people wanted were cities that function, care for people and respect their ecosystems.

Students spoke about gaps in implementation, a lack of transparency and the need for regular dialogue between youth and decision makers. They raised the issue of how caste and class shape access to clean water and sanitation. 

Others pointed out that climate information is rarely available in local languages, and that while communities are already adapting in everyday ways, these efforts are never recognized as climate action. 

Many voiced the need for more grants and interest-free loans for young people building innovative ideas or startups. 

What emerged was not a list of demands but a grounded understanding of what their cities need to function and flourish. 

Through LCOY India, these insights are being brought together into a national youth statement, shaped by regional realities, to be published and shared with ministries, departments and institutions.

Who does climate policy belong to?

Across all cities, one truth became clear. Young people want to be climate leaders; they just need the resources and space to be heard.

The LCOY India process shows what becomes possible when participation is treated as a right rather than a formality. When young people are given space to reflect, imagine and question, climate policy stops feeling distant and begins to feel shared.

If climate action in India is to be meaningful, it must begin by asking a simple question: who does climate policy belong to?

These consultations showed us that policy should reflect the needs of the young people who notice when the water changes color and the heat starts to become unbearable. It belongs to the people quietly adapting as their communities flood.

We need our climate policies to include and serve all marginalized people: youth, rural peoples and people across the caste system.

Climate policy belongs to all of us.