Credo: Charlie Young

Award-winning environmental campaigner, 16

I believe...

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing society and it is going to be my generation that has to deal with it because we are failing disastrously at the moment.

Many people think environmental campaigners are Luddites who want to send the world back to the Dark Ages. It's not true. I wish climate change didn't exist, but as it does, I feel a responsibility to do something about it. And that can isolate me sometimes from my mates.

Schools need to prioritise climate change. They never explain it in depth and give too much weight to denialist voices. What we need now is debate on how we are going to solve it rather than whether it exists.

The biggest problem is getting people to understand the science. In the scientific community, climate change being caused by humans is as accepted as the theory of evolution, but that message isn't reflected in the vast majority of people I know. We won't feel the effects of what we do now for 40 years because of how the carbon cycle works, which makes it hard to link our actions to the reaction of the planet.

Books and films on climate change don't have the impact they want to because they mostly end on an upbeat note – that politicians and technology will ultimately save us, whereas what we need are some guidelines for changing our behaviour, which show us quite how much impact we can have, and need to have, as individuals.

The two biggest things we can do is to change our energy tariffs and not fly. I recently persuaded my family to turn down a holiday in Canada as it would involve flying; my mum takes trains now.

Gordon Brown would seem a much better politician if there was no TV, as in the flesh he is very persuasive and looks less flat.

Charlie Young was presented with the Shout Out Award for campaigning by Gordon Brown on 1 August. The award is organised by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (www.sheilamckechnie.org.uk)