At the beginning of the fall 2023 semester, a group of six students set out to report on the topic of youth climate anxiety in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network. This group includes six Journalism students and each of us is part of at least one of our student newsrooms: the Graphic and NewsWaves 32.
This project was selected by the Solutions Journalism Network as part of their Student Media Challenge. This year, the Student Media Challenge funded each group with $10,000 to use for reporting on the topic of young people and mental health. Our program is examining climate anxiety. Other groups are reporting on mental health and gun violence (The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina) and mental health and the Latinx community (Dimelo magazine at USC).
Solutions Journalism is a reporting approach that focuses on more than just exposing a problem. It looks into how other communities have responded to the same — or a similar — problem and the success rates of those responses.
The Journalism program at Pepperdine already teaches solutions-based journalism in several classes. Because as student journalists, we live within the communities we cover, we have time to dive deep into these solutions and understand how they can fit both the Pepperdine and Malibu communities we live and study in.
We understood from the start of this project, however, this problem would be different. Anxiety is a mental health condition and goes well beyond a policy or government response. Our warming climate will not be going away any time soon, and as long as climate change exists, so will people’s anxiety.
As the academic year and project continued, our group got a front-row seat to our changing climate and our communities’ anxiety over it in action.
In the fall, Southern California had its first-ever tropical storm watch, according to Climate.gov. In the spring semester, the local area experienced weeks of heavy landslides — closing the majority of our routes into and out of campus for days if not weeks.
Even now there are more road closures and delays in reaching our campus than there were when many of us began our education here, as routes remain closed due to slides. Malibu Canyon Road that passes next to our University is sometimes closed for days at a time in advance of rain.
As we reported over the course of this year, we found responses to youth and climate anxiety focused on religious and spiritual responses, activism, and clinical therapeutic responses.
This work serves as a reminder that journalism is more important than ever. As young journalists, we will be covering the consequences of climate change — but this project has taught us the importance of following up with solutions.
This group hopes that this work can inspire young people who are experiencing climate anxiety to search for the solutions that best fit them, and above all, feel encouraged to discover community and know that they are not alone.
– Joe Allgood, Millie Auchard, Marley Penagos, Gabrielle Salgado, Samantha Torre and Abby Wilt
