Now the summer holidays have drawn to a close after weeks of exceptional heat and destructive wildfires, prominent voices continue to blame adults and education for children’s climate concerns. But young people are also responding to what they can see, smell and experience for themselves.
August is behind us, and East Anglia has finally had some space to breathe.
The most oppressive heat has receded, and some rain and cooler spells have brought welcome relief to gardens, fields and exhausted communities, even if the effects of prolonged heat and dry weather cannot be undone by a few showers.
At Dunwich Heath, the fire incident formally ended on 21 August. Yet the reserve and adjoining beach remained closed while the National Trust assessed a landscape transformed by fire, where familiar paths and landmarks had disappeared and damaged trees could still collapse.
The immediate emergency may have passed, but the consequences haven’t. With the end of the summer holidays, we should remember what children have lived through. The heat, smoke and warnings don’t disappear from their experience simply because a new school year begins.
When concern becomes a culture-war target
A recent Telegraph article asked how parents were supposedly failing to protect children from “climate hysteria”. Its subheading placed schools and social media in the foreground as drivers of young people’s fears.
Beneath that provocative framing, the article contained some sensible advice. Children need age-appropriate information. Adults should help them evaluate what they encounter online and avoid leaving them alone with frightening material they can’t process. Climate change shouldn’t be presented as a succession of catastrophes without context, support or possible responses.
This isn’t a new discussion. In 2021, East Anglia Bylines published thoughtful guidance on how to talk to young children about the climate emergency. The need for honesty, care and age-appropriate communication remains.
Climate education can certainly be communicated badly. Adults can overwhelm children, encourage guilt and exaggerate the importance of their individual choices. Telling a child that their electricity use, choice of food or failure to recycle correctly is helping to destroy the planet is neither proportionate nor educationally sound.
Through my work on climate literacy as safeguarding, I have argued that children need honest information without being left to carry responsibility for systems they didn’t create and don’t control. But that’s very different from claiming that climate education itself is the source of their distress.
Even the Telegraph article acknowledges that young people are experiencing heatwaves and witnessing climate-related impacts, making climate change less remote than some threats faced by previous generations. Its sensible recommendations sit uneasily beneath a headline that dismisses climate-related distress as “hysteria”.
And use of such a word isn’t neutral. It collapses rational concern, grief, anger, confusion and clinically significant anxiety into a single disparaging label. It encourages us to see the worried child as the problem, rather than asking what they have experienced and whether trusted adults have helped them make sense of it.
The emergency alert was not hysteria
On Friday 14 August, millions of phones across England and Wales sounded with an official Emergency Alert. People were warned not to light barbecues, campfires, fireworks or anything else that might ignite the exceptionally dry landscape. They were urged to report fires immediately.
It was public-safety advice issued because the wildfire danger had become sufficiently serious to require national action. Yet, as that warning sounded, parts of the public debate were characterising concern about climate change as emotional excess. Children heard adults argue about whether climate risks had been exaggerated while official warnings appeared on phones across the country.
We cannot understand children’s emotional responses while pretending they develop in isolation from the world around them.
East Anglia’s fires were more than a backdrop
By mid-August, National Fire Chiefs Council figures showed that 1,132 wildfires had been recorded across England and Wales. The NFCC cautioned that the number alone couldn’t convey the scale, duration and complexity of individual incidents or their effects on communities, ecosystems and emergency services.
Dunwich Heath became the most devastating local example. Approximately 370 acres of heathland and woodland were affected, and around 600 Suffolk firefighters attended during the first week. Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service said the blaze spread at a “ferocious pace” amid hot weather, prolonged dry conditions and changing winds.
Other East Anglia Bylines writers have already provided fuller accounts of the disaster. David Jobbins has written movingly about what was lost at Dunwich Heath, while Glyn Evans has examined human ignition, public access and our responsibility towards vulnerable wild spaces.
What is particularly interesting to me is what these events reveal about the claim that young people’s climate concern is manufactured by adults. Dunwich is not merely 370 acres on an incident report. Nor are Mousehold Heath and other familiar green spaces simply patches on a map. They may be associated with family walks, wildlife, play, freedom or calm.
When somewhere familiar burns, sadness or fear doesn’t need to have been planted by a teacher. It can come from a child’s relationship with the place itself.
Writing on LinkedIn after the Dunwich fire, Jemma Finch of the National Trust described people sharing photographs, memories, poems and stories, offering their time and contributing more than £600,000 to the recovery appeal.
“With heartbreak has come kindness and hope,” she wrote.
That response shows the emotional meaning a landscape can carry. Children aren’t excluded from such attachments.
The effects of wildfire aren’t confined to direct contact with flames. Smoke can worsen asthma and other respiratory conditions. Families may experience evacuations, road closures, disrupted journeys and uncertainty as conditions change. At Dunwich, ash, unstable trees and the loss of familiar paths and landmarks created hazards that continued after the fire had been extinguished.
Children saw smoke in the sky, heard adults discuss changing conditions and watched familiar places appear in reports of devastation. Their concern doesn’t arise only from lessons or social media, but also from lived experience. So is it really “hysteria” for some of them to find that unsettling?
Who gets to “just enjoy it”?
Other prominent voices have suggested that people should stop worrying and simply enjoy the heat. Yet that assumes one person’s experience can stand in for everybody else’s.
Heat is easier to enjoy when you have a cool home, a shaded garden, good health and reliable access to water and green space. It is different for a child unable to sleep in a top-floor flat, one whose asthma is aggravated by heat or smoke, or a family living close to a wildfire.
As I have written before: the temperature may be the same. The risk is not.
Children experience weather through the circumstances available to them. Housing, health, disability, family income, location and access to support all shape whether hot weather means pleasure, discomfort or danger.
Some pupils will have returned to school remembering an enjoyable summer. Others may have arrived tired, unsettled or carrying questions about what they witnessed. Adults shouldn’t assume that every child is distressed, but neither should they dismiss those who are.
What children need from us
The adult task is not to frighten children or offer false reassurance.
We should help them distinguish seriousness from inevitability, explain what is happening in age-appropriate ways and help them evaluate what they encounter online. We should also be honest about where responsibility and decision-making power really sit.
Climate literacy shouldn’t load a systemic crisis onto children’s shoulders. At its best, it helps them understand their experiences, place those experiences in context and know that trusted adults are willing to listen.
This is important as schools begin a new academic year. Staff don’t need to manufacture a crisis or treat every expression of climate concern as a safeguarding issue. But it is a contextual safeguarding issue when they notice a pupil’s experiences of heat, wildfire, smoke or environmental loss are affecting their sleep, health, concentration, participation or sense of safety.
The emergency alert sounded because the danger was real. Dunwich Heath did not burn in a newspaper culture war. Its altered landscape and the long recovery ahead exist regardless of whether climate concern is editorially convenient.
Children need honesty without catastrophism, agency without misplaced guilt and support without shame. Above all, they need to know that they are not responsible for solving this alone.
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