Youth forum focuses on climate
Students from across province attend event hosted by University of Windsor
Adeline Cohen has a few good reasons for being interested in what people can do to mitigate climate change.
The 18-year-old high school student from Whitby is originally from New Orleans, a below-sea-level city that was ravaged by flooding from hurricane Katrina in 2005.
She has family in Jakarta, an Indonesian city of more than nine million people that’s sinking while the Java Sea is rising. And she has other relatives in Australia where wildfires have consumed more than 25 million acres and forced thousands to evacuate.
With a personal connection to several of the globe’s greatest climate challenges, Cohen was eager to sign up for a youth workshop on climate action hosted by the University of Windsor.
“I’m involved in climate activism in Whitby and I heard about the conference,” said Cohen, a Grade 12 student at O’neill Collegiate and Vocational Institute. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet other people who are interested in preserving our environment.”
Cohen was among 140 students from across the province who took part in the three-day youth conference on climate action organized by the Windsor Law Cities and Climate Action Forum.
The conference opened Sunday evening and was scheduled to wrap up Wednesday.
Students could attend a wide array of workshops on creating vibrant healthy cities, climate mitigation, tools for urban planning and the one Cohen attended Tuesday on debunking climate myths.
Third-year law students Sarah Gulas and Victoria Gordon gave a group of approximately 30 students a brief overview of the scientific research behind climate change then presented an interactive exercise in how to identify fake news at the downtown School of Creative Arts.
“It’s good for them to know if the source is portraying accurate information,” Gulas said. “Fake news is becoming a really prominent concern and sometimes science gets confused in this mix of information.”
The students were each given three articles on climate change from three different sources. Together, they looked at the differences between a news article, a scientific journal and a blog.
“Think critically about what you’re reading to decide if it’s reliable or not,” Gordon said.
The conference featured several keynote speakers, including Dianne Saxe, former environmental commissioner of Ontario; David Miller, C40 Cities global advocacy director and former Toronto mayor; Edward Eli George, a water-walker from Saugeen First Nation; and Mike de Sousa, an environment investigative reporter with Global News.
The conference partnered with the Windsor International Film Festival for two showings during the event of This Changes Everything and the Canadian première of 2040.
The workshop was scheduled to conclude with a roundtable discussion Wednesday on education and careers in climate change.
The forum got a recent $125,000 funding boost from the federal government’s Climate Action Fund. The $3-million fund was split among 19 selected projects.