Who’s got the time? Barriers to Climate Action for Toronto’s Black and Racialized Youth

Authors: Erum Naqvi, Zoha Sojoudi, Ibtesaam Mohamed Afroz Moosa and Ayesha Ali

For Toronto’s Black and racialized youth, climate change isn’t an abstract crisis — it’s an everyday reality. They experience it in the blistering heat of under-resourced neighbourhoods, floods that destroy homes, and wildfire smoke they’re forced to adapt to.  

However, although youth care deeply, systemic barriers block their path to meaningful action, so they feel disconnected from decision-making processes that directly impact them. As a result, the City’s climate policies fail to account for their lived realities, solutions are presented without their collaboration, and policy language distances rather than connects — all of which culminates in youth losing trust in institutions. 

In particular, youth from Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs) (which are often made up of marginalized individuals) are disproportionately impacted due to the historic disinvestment their communities face as a consequence of systemic discrimination. Thus, integrating accountability mechanisms into climate policy is crucial for effective City-wide climate engagement, particularly for NIA-based youth that face greater climate risk. However, although the City has several accountability mechanisms in place, significant gaps in awareness, trust, and effectiveness persist for young climate leaders. 

In a breakout room discussion at the November 2024 Reach Symposium, fellow youth researchers, policymakers, and other academic experts emphasized the following barriers to effective climate action:  

Time poverty. Black and racialized youth face challenges which make showing up for the climate cause ever more difficult. It’s not that communities aren’t aware of the threat posed by climate change — in fact, communities are often at the front lines and experience the most devastating consequences first. It’s just that communities face other intersecting issues that often take priority — such as inaccessible transit, housing crises, and food insecurity. The priority gap between the City and vulnerable communities needs to be closed to wholly pursue climate justice.  

Semantics. How the government frames community engagement within communications like official strategies should not be taken for granted. For example, “empowering” communities implies a problematic and unequal relationship between the one granting power and the one receiving power. While empowerment implies that those on the receiving end will have the ability to incite change, in practice the government tends to control policy implementation. Institutions should be redesigned for power sharing, not power lending.   

Community-led, government-mediated. Climate action should be community-driven but mediated/supported by the government, who should serve as a bridge-builder between the community and climate decisions. Communities have a wealth of information, and thus having them at the forefront of climate action would enable the development of localized solutions tailored to their needs. For instance, communities can lead local data collection pertaining to climate action. At the same time, it is critical to have government support — communities should not have excessive burdens on them. The government can provide this support by developing community agencies and funding community organizations. 

What’s Next? 

To target these concerns, the City must bridge the relationship gap between itself and the communities it serves. To do so, we propose an accountability approach centering the voices and experiences of Black and racialized youth in NIAs, to hold the City accountable for its climate promises. Our approach, which is rooted in a focus on community, highlights four key accountability principles: (1) being accessible, (2) being representative and relatable, (3) creating shared understanding, and (4) “walking the talk.” Two additional supporting pillars sustain a strong accountability relationship: (1) going beyond “band-aid” solutions and (2) expanding climate education. 

Accountability lies not in imposing solutions, but in creating the conditions for communities to lead. Thus, The City’s future doesn’t depend on government-led action — it depends on those who are already at the forefront.