By Kisean
Young people in Antigua and Barbuda are inheriting escalating climate risks while lacking the power, protection, and resources to adequately respond, according to a youth advocate who addressed the launch of a groundbreaking report on climate change and human exploitation.
Marver Woodley, Coordinator of the Commonwealth Youth Climate Change Network and Senior Operations and Policy Manager at Antigua and Barbuda’s Department of the Blue Economy, warned that climate shocks are creating dangerous vulnerabilities for youth, forcing them to choose between education and survival.
Speaking at Thursday’s launch of the report “From Climate Crisis to Human Exploitation,” Woodley painted a stark picture of how natural disasters are disrupting educational access for young people across the region.
“We have students missing classes due to displacement or caregiving responsibilities,” Woodley explained. “During COVID, we saw that big shift towards online classroom and education. If a natural disaster is to happen, we don’t even have the luxury of shifting the classroom online because people will not have internet access or even the tools to get online to access their education.”
The report, produced through collaboration between Free the Slaves and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, examines how climate-related vulnerabilities contribute to human exploitation, including trafficking and forced labor in small island developing states.
Woodley emphasized that young people are experiencing the current impacts of climate change, despite contributing the least to the crisis. She cited Barbuda’s experience after Hurricane Irma as a local example, noting that the island’s two schools have taken considerable time to recover and have not yet met adequate standards.
“Climate shocks continue to increase, whether schools are damaged by hurricanes, floods, and now we also have the added problem of heat stress,” Woodley said, adding that students face impossible choices after climate events devastate households, forcing them to decide between continuing their education or working to help their families survive.
Regarding youth employment, Woodley warned that climate impacts are undermining traditional sectors young people rely on for work, including tourism, agriculture, and fisheries.
“We are heavily dependent on tourism, and we still suffer from food security issues,” she said. “And then we have fisheries heavily affected by climate change because of rising sea levels, the warming of the oceans, and ocean acidification.”
Young people face precarious employment conditions, particularly in the tourism sector, where seasonal work is already unstable. When climate crises strike, these vulnerabilities intensify, pushing youth into informal sectors with unsafe working conditions and limited protections against exploitation.
Despite rhetoric about youth inclusion, Woodley identified significant barriers preventing young people from participating meaningfully in climate policy and decision-making.
“We see young persons are invited to speak but not invited to shape the outcomes or the budget,” she said, describing what she called “tokenism” in youth engagement. “There’s closed negotiation spaces, unpaid participation and even travel costs that prevent young people from fully accessing and participating.”
Woodley said meaningful participation requires early involvement in policy design, clear pathways from youth recommendations to government actions, and proper resourcing. “Capacity is not charity,” she emphasized.
She outlined priority actions for Antigua and Barbuda, including allocating more resources annually to prevention rather than responding only after disasters, and improving climate literacy across all age groups.
“Most people don’t understand climate change is happening every day, but because of human interaction, it is expedited,” she explained.
In a powerful closing statement, Woodley challenged the current approach to youth engagement in climate action.
“Young people are not risks to be managed; we are resources to be invested in,” she declared. “If climate responses fail to center youth and intergenerational equity, they’ll fail altogether. The choice before us is simple, we continue to design climate solutions for young people, or we build them with young people on the scale that the crisis demands.
