Our teenage columnist Olivia Harris turns her attention to climate change and the younger generation.

With the UN only recently announcing a code red for humanity in regards to climate change, is it time that those of us who haven’t sat down and thought about the impact, start to look at it from a more serious angle?

I see a huge number of articles on climate change and if I am being honest, not one of them has ever stood out to me (possibly because I lacked the knowledge or that it seemed a situation too great for a teenager like me to change).

Climate change in my opinion, is always a phrase that gets thrown around a bit too lightly, leaving teenagers like me to detach any feelings to make a change towards it.

However, in these past couple of weeks with the code red announced, it led me to thinking about the impact that it could have on myself and those around me just a few decades down the line.

I’ve always thought, why should us teenagers have to be the ones to make a change? Shouldn’t older generations be held just as likely to make a change as we should?

Then it occurred to me; our generation has a grasp on liberation and the power to change like no other before. We as teenagers aren’t afraid to cast our opinions/ support for any causes all over social media, and why should climate change be any different?

Compared to many other causes that have been spoken about in the past year, through the use of social media, climate change has always been on the backseat for many of us (including me).

We haven’t been passionate about it like we have with other issues, and I can tell you why. It is such a large-scale issue that a 14-year-old sat in their bedroom, is not going to think that she can have any impact on it, so she decides to forget.

The real problem is that we all must do our bit at some stage, and leaving it down to teenagers is an unlikely task, due to the small number of teenagers in comparison to older generations.

Not only do teenagers need to influence adults but it needs to also be in reverse. The question is when will this change and, do we even have enough time to wait?