Four of us started this project with a Google Doc titled "climate thing??", a shared frustration that most youth climate content online is either a slideshow of statistics or a slogan on a poster, and absolutely no idea how to write something that looked like a real report. Six months later, we'd produced a 28-page research report mapping local climate action against the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the kind of document we used to assume only universities or NGOs had the resources to make. Here's how it actually came together, mistakes included.
Starting with a question too big to answer
Our first version of this project was, frankly, unworkable: "how is climate change affecting young people." That's not a research question, it's a topic. Every source we pulled felt like it could go anywhere, because the question gave us no boundaries. We spent almost three full weeks reading broadly before one of us asked the obvious question out loud: what, specifically, are we trying to find out that someone could actually act on?
We landed on something far narrower: how well do our own three home cities' local climate plans actually align with the UN's relevant Sustainable Development Goals, and where are the gaps. Narrower felt like giving something up at the time. It's the single decision that made the entire rest of the project possible.
Finding sources without a university library
None of us had institutional access to academic databases, so our early research leaned heavily on government and city planning documents, which are public by law in most places, plus reports from organizations like the UN, the IPCC, and regional environmental nonprofits, almost all of which publish their full reports free online. We cross-checked every claim using the same five-point check our Research Starter Kit walks through, looking hard at who funded a report and whether it cited its own evidence, since climate research in particular attracts a lot of agenda-driven writing on both sides.
For local data specifically, we emailed two city council offices directly, asking for their published climate action plans. One never responded. The other sent us a 40-page PDF and, unexpectedly, the actual planner's email address for follow-up questions, which became one of our better sources.
Designing a study we could actually run as students
We originally planned to survey residents in all three cities about climate awareness, a real, if small, research study. In practice, designing an ethical survey, getting a meaningful sample size, and analyzing the results properly would have taken longer than the rest of the report combined. We made the call to scope our own primary research down to a smaller, structured comparison of the three cities' published plans against specific SDG targets, and lean on existing public surveys and studies for the broader context instead of trying to replicate that data ourselves.
This is the part of research nobody really tells you about in advance: knowing what to cut is as much a skill as knowing what to include. A smaller, well-executed study beats an ambitious one you can't actually finish properly.
"A narrower question you can actually finish will always beat a bigger one you can't."
The writing process, divided four ways
We split the report into sections by city, plus one of us handling the introduction, methodology, and synthesis across all three. This created a new problem: four different writing voices that didn't read like one coherent report. Our fix was a final editing pass where two of us read the entire document out loud, together, on a call, catching every place the tone jumped between sections. It took an entire Sunday afternoon. It was the single most valuable afternoon of the whole project.
What we'd do differently next time
We'd narrow our question even earlier instead of spending three weeks reading broadly first. We'd reach out to local officials in week one instead of week nine, since waiting on email responses turned out to be our single biggest bottleneck. And we'd build our citation library in Zotero from day one instead of retroactively trying to track down where every fact came from during the final week, which cost us an entire extra weekend we didn't need to lose.
Why we did this with no budget and no lab
The honest answer is that we didn't think we were allowed to do "real" research until we just started doing it. Nobody gatekept us. There was no application to access public city documents, no fee to read UN reports, no permission required to email a city planner and ask a question. The report we produced isn't going to change international climate policy. It is a real, citable, properly-sourced piece of research that four students built entirely on weekends, and that fact alone is worth more to us than any single finding inside it.
If you want to see what an evergreen, well-organized research project actually looks like in worksheet form, the Research Starter Kit in our resources page walks through the exact SHARP source-evaluation method and FINE question-check we used throughout this project.