Y-Adapt

Welcome!

Climate change is happening. Impacts are projected to become increasingly severe. Youth can be important agents of change in raising awareness and taking action.

‘Y-Adapt’ or ‘Youth Adapt’ is an interactive, games-based curriculum. It educates, engages and inspires youth to act in their communities to adapt to climate change.

How does Y-Adapt create real world change?

• Knowledge and Sharing–Youth learn about climate change and its impacts and can share their experiences with other youth around the world.
• Community – Youth engage their local communities on climate change action and become part of the global Y-Adapt community.
• Action– Youth work together to adapt resources in their community to reduce climate change impacts and become more climate resilient.

Running Y-Adapt

• Youth: This curriculum is designed for youth aged 13-25
• Training: Facilitators should be trained in the methodology
• Inclusive: Strive for an inclusive, gender balanced participant selection
• Sessions: 7 sessions, that take approximately 1 hour each – see time guides
• Duration: Recommended to run 1 or 2 modules per week over 3-4 weeks
• Intensive: It is possible to run Y-Adapt intensively over 3 days
• Action: After module 6, youth have 6-8 weeks to implement their action plan
• Monitor: Progress is innovatively monitored through youth-led photo diaries
• Evaluate: Actions are documented in ‘Adaptation Cards’ to evaluate outputs
• Inspire: Y-Adapt actions are shared globally to inspire more youth-led action!

Sessions

Session 1: Introduction

An introduction to Y-adapt ending in a creative competition where teams present real-life examples of youth-led adaptations from around the world.

Go to Session 1

Session 2: Climate Change Challenge

A playful session that demonstrates weather compared to climate, leading into an energetic game that teaches about the greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change.

Go to Session 2

Session 3: Map the Hazard

Critical thinking challenge to map out extreme weather and its impacts. Voting determines the most frequent and impactful hazards in the local community.

Go to Session 2

Session 4: See the System

A card game where teams of players compete to identify how people, places, and things (resources) fit into systems. This is followed by an interactive exercise in which youth systematically brainstorm the important resources in their community.

Go to Session 4

Session 5: Act to Adapt

A giant board game that gets youth to prioritise important resources in their community which are vulnerable to specific extreme weather events. Youth must negotiate with each other to take individual or collective actions to protect their community resources.

Go to Session 5

Session 6: Choose your Challenge

An interactive challenge in which youth must create an action plan to adapt their community. Youth engage in a reality role-play competition to act through challenges and solutions in implementing their plans, before choosing the adaptation they will implement in real life.

Go to Session 6

Session 7: Join the Y-Adapt Global Community

This is the final session of the Y-adapt curriculum. Youth create an adaptation card to capture the real world adaptation that they implemented in their community. The card is then shared to inspire other youth around the world, to inspire them to also take action.

Go to Session 7

Materials

A facilitation guide and other materials are available on this website. We have also translated the files to French, find the J’Adapte files here.

To help you learn how to facilitate each session, we have developed facilitation videos, which you can find here.

Acknowledgement

Y-Adapt is the product of a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the Philippine Red Cross, PLAN International and the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.

We also extend our gratitude to the following partners, which have played a key role in the testing and finalisation of the materials: PLAN Philippines, Haiti Red Cross, Guatemala Red Cross and Iranian Red Crescent.

All Y-Adapt materials are licensed with Creative Commons Attribution: NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 international License.

Contact

For further information on these materials please contact:

y-adapt@climatecentre.org