The “Next-Gen COP” as a tool for communicating climate change and catalyze solutions from high school students

The “Next-Gen COP”, developed by CIMA Research Foundation in collaboration with ARPA Valle d’Aosta and Fondazione Montagna Sicura, is an innovative climate-education programme designed to empower secondary-school students with the knowledge, skills, and agency needed to engage meaningfully in climate action. By simulating the negotiation dynamics of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, the initiative integrates scientific literacy, sociopolitical understanding, and participatory decision-making into a single experiential learning pathway. Launched in 2023 within the RESERVAQUA project, the “Next-Gen COP” focuses on climate-induced water challenges - drought, competing uses, and resource conflicts - issues that strongly affect Alpine and Mediterranean regions. The programme combines multiple pedagogical components: scientific training on the physical and legal-political dimensions of climate change; collaborative problem-solving, where students design water-management strategies inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals; dialogue with experts, enabling learners to refine proposals through evidence-based reasoning; Peer-to-peer communication, through poster sessions and public presentation; a final negotiation simulation, mirroring COP procedures, including amendments, consensus-building, and voting. This structure allows students to develop not only climate knowledge, but also key competences highlighted in the session,such as systems thinking, critical analysis, negotiation, and civic engagement. Indeed, the process culminates in a “Next-Gen Charter”, containing ten adaptation and mitigation proposals, formally presented to local policymakers, thereby linking classroom learning to real-world governance. The first edition in Valle d’Aosta involved around 150 students and demonstrated the programme’s capacity to foster climate agency, strengthen understanding of water-related risks, and promote inclusive, community-oriented climate action. The model is now being replicated in Liguria and Trento-Bolzano, expanding its reach and enabling comparative insights across diverse socioenvironmental contexts. The “Next-Gen COP” offers a scalable and transferable approach to climate change education, showing how experiential, participatory, and policy-oriented learning can empower young people to contribute actively to climate resilience at local and global scales.