The top floor of UVM’s Davis Center was crawling with teens Nov. 20, as the university held its second Vermont Youth Climate Summit. More than 120 Vermont high school students and teachers from 14 high schools gathered at the student center to create climate action plans designed to reduce the carbon footprint of their high schools.

They were assisted in the planning process by the 70 UVM undergraduates taking "Introduction to Ecological Economics," a course offered in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and by taught Jon Erickson, organizer of the event, professor in the Rubenstein School, and the author of a leading textbook on teaching ecological economics through service-learning.

A key project of Erickson’s class was to organize and deliver a climate summit for Vermont youth. Students used UVM’s climate action plan, which calls for the university to achieve net zero emissions by 2025, as a model for understanding and teaching the climate action planning process.  

Vermont Youth Climate Summit

In both the morning and afternoon, teams of five to seven of high school students accompanied by their UVM mentors took up residence in the many small meeting rooms on the Davis Center's top floor for 90-minute workshop sessions. Teachers gathered in their own workshops to discuss the climate planning process with Erickson, visiting teachers from a sister summit in the Adirondacks, and UVM sophomore Gina Fiorile, an expert on the youth climate summit model. 

Vermont Youth Climate Summit

The day began with reports from teams who attended last year's summit on the actions they’d implemented over the year as part of their climate plans, ranging from school gardens and compost programs to grants and plans for solar projects. At lunch, students heard an address from Vermont governor Peter Shumlin. At the end of the day they huddled with their teachers to write out the beginnings of climate action plans to be carried out during the rest of the year.

"Vermont youth are responding to a global call to action,” Erickson says. “In class they hear the bad news about their future, but at the summit, college and high school students get an opportunity to work together and lead by example."

Vermont Youth Climate Summit

A White House model

The Youth Climate Summit model was chosen this year by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to become a national model for climate change education, and Fiorile, who helped implement one of the first youth climate summits as a high school student in the Adirondacks -- working with the Wild Center, the science museum of the Adirondacks -- was invited to the White House twice in 2015 to speak about involving youth in the climate change battle.

As a first-year student at UVM, Fiorile worked with Erickson and his class to export the Wild Center's Adirondack Youth Climate to Vermont. The event is considered one of the most successful adaptions of the youth climate summit model.

This week Fiorile travels abroad to speak at Finland’s Youth Climate Summit, an event she helped create during an internship at the Wild Center last summer. Next week, Fiorile will travel to Paris to represent the Wild Center and the White House at COP21. She’ll speak on two panels there about climate change and youth, a main theme of the negotiations' side events this year.

The UVM Youth Climate Summit was cosponsored by the university’s Environmental Program, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, Humanities Center, and Rubenstein School Environment and Natural Resources and by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. 

Read a PDF of the letter Sen. Sanders sent to the summit. 

Media coverage of the event:

PUBLISHED

11-23-2015
Jeffrey R. Wakefield