Climate fiction (CliFi) books (also known as eco-fiction) are ones that deal with climate change as part of the plot in which the characters struggle to survive. A lot of dystopian novels are clifi books because the breakdown of society is attributed to a catastrophic event like a nuclear war that affects the climate. I wanted to focus here on books where the climatic event was not directly caused by a man-made event like a war, but by nature, for the most part. Not all of these novels are realistic fiction or science fiction; at least one contains fantastical elements as well.
In The Islands at the End of the World by Austin Aslan (2014), Leilani, 
16, and Mike, her ecologist father, go to Honolulu for treatment for her epilepsy but when a cloudlike organism appears in the sky after a tsunami, it causes the world to panic and plunges the metropolitan area into chaos. She and her father find themselves detained in an internment camp and struggle to get back to their family on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Natural resources are at an all-time low in 16-year-old Tess’s futuristic world in Georgia Clark’s Parched (2014). Most remaining supplies are funneled into Eden, a walled city of privilege, where she was born, but the citizens who live outside the wall in the Badlands are much worse off. After the death of her scientist mother Tessa decides to combat this inequality by joining a rebel group called Kudzu and uncovers a shocking government plot to carry out genocide in the Badlands using artificial intelligence.
Two weeks after the radio in the United Kingdom started broadcasting the warning, “It’s in the rain. It’s 
fatal and there’s no cure,” the drinkable water is running out and most of the population is dead in H2O (2014) by Virginia Bergin. Ruby’s one of the survivors and she’s left with two options: persevere on her own, or embark on a treacherous journey across the country to find her father- if he’s even alive.
Continue reading Genre Guide: Cli-fi (Climate Fiction) in YA Lit