This year’s Climate Cardinals x ChallengeUS Future Leaders Competition brought together students from around the world to share bold, creative perspectives on climate action through writing, speech, and art. From a highly competitive global pool, these students rose to the top with ideas that challenge, inspire, and reimagine what climate leadership can look like.
Isaac James felt an enormous sense of urgency when he founded OutVote, an organization dedicated to mobilizing Gen Z voters. It’s why he launched the initiative (along with his co-founder Ranen Miao) while still a student at Oxford University, where he witnessed from afar the swell of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that dominated the 2024 election.
As federal climate funding shrinks under the Trump administration, Tucson is leaning on public-private partnerships to expand solar access, grow its urban tree canopy and protect residents from deadly heat. Co-lead of the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, Ojas Sanghi, talked about efforts to help develop long-term climate solutions. Sanghi said he was inspired to pursue climate work after growing up in India and returning to Tucson for high school, where he noticed the disparities and impacts of climate change firsthand.
Three activists: Vanessa Nakate, Xiye Bastida and Sophia Kianni, come from all corners of the globe and are brought to the environmental crisis for various reasons. Fueled by community, identity and language, they are sparking a global movement to dismantle climate injustice and tackle the climate crisis. Kianni, from Climate Cardinals, says “It is essential to engage people that were previously excluded from climate dialogues in our work because it’s easy for them to become disengaged if there isn’t an active institutional effort to rope them in.”
The forum of the Democratic gubernatorial candidates at the Portland Media Center on Congress Street, which was also the subject of watch parties at college campuses across the state, was organized by the Community Organizing Alliance, Maine Youth Power and the Young People’s Caucus
After 15 months of regular discussions and drafting, it all came down to a single item among 65 in a three-pages-long meeting agenda. Buried among the reports, contracts, finance discussions and board policy decisions in the monthly Phoenix Union High School board meeting was a scheduled vote on the state’s first climate action resolution for a high school district. “It’s exciting that (the climate) still something that people are wanting to fight for, and that we are trying to fight for,” said Shaela Patel, an organizer with the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition and a junior at Arizona State University.
A student-led climate resolution was passed Thursday by the Phoenix Union High School District. But the action could face financial challenges as the Trump administration continues to dismantle climate protections.Shaela Patel is an organizer with the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, which helped create the framework for the plan. She said closing the financing gap is key.
As policy director of the youth-led Maine Youth Power, Eli Durand McDonnell regularly speaks with young people throughout the state. While priorities often range based on a given community’s needs, these days he said he’s heard a lot about the same issue: “fear of ICE’s violent immigration crackdown and the seemingly complete immunity with which they operate.” Durand McDonnell said he and others in the group “need to see that our leaders are doing what they can to protect Maine residents and to protect our civil liberties, not just today but for generations to come. LD 2176 would create some of those protections.”
A new white paper argues that the lack of translated disaster warnings is emblematic of a much broader problem: Climate change information, from emergency alerts to scientific research, is overwhelmingly produced only in English. The research, published by Climate Cardinals, a youth-led climate advocacy organization focused on language access, found that 80 percent of scientific papers are published in English, which is spoken by just 18 percent of the world’s population. The researchers argue that most of the world is excluded from the information needed to understand how climate change is reshaping the planet, including people in positions of power