Net zero won’t be delivered by one generation on behalf of another
The dominant framing of climate action places one generation in the role of decision-maker and another in the role of beneficiary. Older adults act today; younger people inherit the results tomorrow. It is well-meaning but it misrepresents how change actually happens, and it lets us off the hook from asking harder questions about how we get there.
Leonie Taylor of The Young Foundation makes this argument compellingly in her latest piece on intergenerational climate action. Climate action, she writes, is not something that happens between generations; it must happen across them. That distinction matters. It shifts the question from who is responsible to how we act together and it has real consequences for how we design participation, policy and community.
Her retrofit example is drawn from a 2025 Young Foundation report and cuts to the heart of it. Younger family members research the schemes, gather the information and bring it home. Older family members hold the tenure, the capital and the final decision. Neither can act alone. Progress is not a question of one generation leading and another following, it is a question of both understanding each other well enough to move together.
This is what joint decision-making looks like in practice and it asks something that policy cannot deliver on its own: the conditions for genuine understanding, spaces where different generations encounter the same questions, hear each other’s perspectives and build the trust that makes shared action possible.
We know what those conditions look like. At Intergenerational Music Making, the Sounds of Sustainability programme brings communities of all ages into contact with the places they live and the changes those places are facing. Participants are not assigned roles, one group as expert, another as learner. They encounter the same environment and make meaning from it together, each bringing what only their experience can offer.
Through our join campaign, Talking Generations, we create the everyday structures where these conversations can happen as a matter of course, not exception. The model is consistent: offer the conditions for understanding, connection and mutual benefit and people across the life course will engage, contribute and act together in ways that no single-generation approach can replicate.
Leonie is right that participation does not happen automatically. It requires sustained investment in trusted local organisations, inclusive processes and the long-term relationships that reach people beyond those who already have the time and resources to engage. Policy can create panels; it cannot create the trust, curiosity and mutual regard that make joint decisions possible.
At Intergenerational England, we welcome the Youth Climate and Nature Panel as a meaningful step. But as Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh shapes the next phase of the transition, the question Leonie poses is the right one to hold: are we passing on a better future, or building one together?
