Fired up: Meet 30 youth leaders sparking change

Adria Vasil and Natalie Alcoba — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:00:58 +0000

Rita Steele had planned a West Coast summer road trip as a respite from the demands of her sustainability work at Simon Fraser University. The 28-year-old climate-action instructor and sustainable-operations manager was hoping for a blissful escape before the new academic year. “Instead, I found myself in the thick of climate change’s brutal reality,” she says.

While driving through Oregon, Steele was engulfed in a blanket of wildfire smoke, unable to see 10 feet ahead. The road she had traversed just days before through Kelowna was now consumed by raging flames.

“It’s impossible not to see and feel the impacts of climate change when you’re in the thick of it in the day-to-day, and we all are now,” says Steele, who was born and raised in British Columbia, where deadly heat domes, atmospheric rivers and record-breaking wildfires have increased in intensity and frequency. “It’s a constant reminder of how important our work is.”

The summer’s devastating wildfires hit home for Serena Mendizábal, too. “Recent events have impacted my kin personally in Maui and Northwest Territories,” says the 25-year-old community organizer from Six Nations of the Grand River, who works as the just-transition lead at Sacred Earth Solar. “It solidifies the necessity of my work in clean energy and climate justice . . . Indigenous-led climate solutions are needed more now than ever.”

More than any other generation, Gen Zs and millennials are feeling the heat, with the brutal impacts of the climate crisis clearer than ever and fuelling a global wave of climate anxiety. UNICEF surveyed nearly 3,400 young people in 15 countries across Africa, Asia, and North and South America and shared the findings at Climate Week NYC in September. They found that more than half (57%) experience eco-anxiety. Rather than looking away, youth leaders are channelling their emotions into action. But it isn’t always easy.

“I have to be honest – it has been difficult,” says 16-year-old Sophia Mathur, a founder of Canada’s Fridays for Future. She took four weeks off in the wilderness with no phone to recharge before coming back online to lead the Global Day of Action in Sudbury in September, during which more than half a million people rallied in more than 60 countries to demand an end to fossil fuels.

Tyler De Sousa, the co-founder of reusable packaging platform Circulr, admits that worsening climate events can bring on a sense of paralysis. But then the fear gives way to a resounding sense of urgency and resolve. “I think that’s what I’ve carried into my work and my day-to-day life: every second counts.”

As the executive director of a network of more than 600 municipal officials on the front lines of floods, wildfires and heat waves, Alex Lidstone agrees. “The frequency and intensity of these events push me to work harder to get solutions and best practices to as many communities as possible so they are prepared and the impact is minimized.”

Whether they call themselves activists, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, innovators or community builders, Corporate Knights’ 2023 30 Under 30 sustainability leaders have one thing in common: they’re all agents of change. They’re building furniture out of reused chopsticks, diverting tonnes of demolition material back into new condo projects, fostering vertical farming ventures to address food insecurity, financing diverse start-ups and sowing seeds of activism for the young leaders who will follow.

Back in Sudbury, Mathur says she’s “empowered more than ever” and working on getting her city to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s while she waits for her next day in court as the lead plaintiff in a history-making climate lawsuit against the Ontario government. “The climate crisis is solvable, and a better world awaits if we listen to the experts and cooperate.”

How we found the top 30:

Every April, Corporate Knights opens the 30 Under 30 nominations to the public. An internal team narrowed the list of submissions down to a short list of 50, then our panel of judges each submitted their top 30 picks, and we tallied the votes.

Judges

Senator Rosa Galvez
Canadian senator and president of the ParlAmericas climate change network

Kat Cadungog
Executive director, Foundation for Environmental Stewardship, and a 2022 Corporate Knights 30 Under 30

Kyra Bell-Pasht
Director of research and policy, Investors for Paris Compliance

Adria Vasil
Managing editor of Corporate Knights and bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series

Want to be on next year’s 30 Under 30? Visit corporateknights.com in April 2024 to nominate any change agents under 30 that you think should be considered for next year’s list.

Kayah George

25, Vancouver

Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nation water protector and filmmaker

Kayah George used to play in a creek behind her grandmother’s house, but the water has become so contaminated by upstream construction that people started developing rashes. “Many of the places where our family traditionally held ceremonies are now too polluted to be able to use,” George says. Carrying the teachings of her Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, George has been on the front lines fighting against the Trans Mountain Pipeline for more than half her life, defending her people’s sacred inlet and the southern resident orca whales from a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic. She recently cowrote, directed and produced a short film entitled Our Grandmother the Inlet on the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet; it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival this falll. “It’s the artist’s job to make the revolution irresistible,” George says, referring to a quote from Toni Cade Bambara that “changed everything” for her. “I set out to create art that did just that.”

Alex Lidstone

29, Calgary
executive director,
Climate Caucus

When climate emergency strikes, it’s not the federal government that shows up first. Local governments are the ones on the front lines of wildfires, floods and droughts; they’re also proving to be the fastest to act when it comes to taking bolder climate action. “That’s critical during this decade of transformation,” Alex Lidstone says. As someone who grew up in a province ravaged by smoke and fire, she joined Climate Caucus, a non-partisan network of elected officials, with the hope of driving system change. “We began experiencing intense fire seasons unlike those I had seen before, and I decided to dedicate my life to this work.” Since she took the reins at Climate Caucus, Lidstone has proudly helped grow the network from roughly 300 to more than 650 elected leaders, helping them work together in times of crisis and make building back better easier. As for the fires, they may be growing stronger, but so is Lidstone’s resolve to find solutions. Making partnerships, she says, is critical: “Don’t leave yourself to tackle this challenge alone!”

Julien Beaulieu

29, Gatineau, QC
law lecturer, Université de Sherbrooke

Almost half the world’s largest corporations have pledged to go net-zero, but far too many of them are “climate-washing,” Julien Beaulieu says. In 2021, the competition lawyer worked with the Québec Environmental Law Center to file one of the first-ever climate-washing cases in Canada, aiming to reform Canada’s consumer protection laws to better regulate net-zero pledges and carbon-neutrality claims. He’s also teaching one of Canada’s first graduate law courses on responsible investment, shareholder activism and environmental disclosures to help “shift the way a new generation of legal practitioners thinks about the role of corporations.” Impressive for a person who readily admits that “sustainability was never really my thing” until friends convinced him of the urgency of the environmental crisis. “Their engagement made me realize how much sustainability is a foundational issue that is intertwined with every other social issue that we’re facing right now.”

Kristen Perry

26, Toronto
managing director, Spring Investing Collective

Kristen Perry is blazing a trail for under-represented Canadians to participate in impact investing. “I work to help our growing portfolio of predominantly women-led and BIPOC-led sustainable businesses to grow and thrive,” says Perry, who happens to be the youngest leader of an angel network in Canada – Spring Investing, the largest early-stage impact investing network in the country. “I’ve been drawn to entrepreneurship and sustainability from a young age,” she says. “Studying business, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied in my career if I wasn’t leveraging my skills, resources and time to work towards something beyond myself.” Over the course of her career, she has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs through incubation, acceleration, investment readiness, fundraising support and founder coaching. Spring has been able to catalyze more than $22 million into early-stage impact ventures. “There is a $4-trillion annual gap in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. I believe that private markets have a big role to play in making the world a better place.”

Sabrina Kon

29, Vancouver
head of community and impact, ChopValue

Making a difference, one chopstick at a time. That is the ethos at ChopValue, a Vancouver-based company that repurposes used chopsticks into furniture and design products. As head of community and impact, Sabrina Kon has built and oversees the company’s chopstick-recycling program, working with more than 1,500 partners across more than a dozen cities on three continents. The company has so far given 120 million chopsticks a new life. “By repurposing used chopsticks into furniture, this is just one example of giving a new life to a disposable item that is typically ordered from Asia, travels to the rest of the world and is used for only 20 to 30 minutes before being discarded,” says Kon, who started her career managing a portfolio of philanthropic funds to enable the execution of climate projects at ClientEarth, an environmental law firm. “There’s a lot of work to be done to advance the circular economy and ensure that we are moving away from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ system.”

Michael Mousa

29, Toronto
sustainability consultant, DIALOG; chair, Carbon Leadership Forum Toronto

As a second-generation Egyptian-Canadian, there was a lot of pressure on Michael Mousa to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer. “I chose engineering school,” Mousa says. “That’s where I started to understand the complex issues facing our built environment, environmental justice and the connection between health, equity and sustainability.” Clearly, he chose wisely. Today he’s the Canada chair of the Carbon Leadership Forum, where he leads a team in empowering the building industry to address an issue it long ignored: the embodied carbon lurking in building materials. Through his work as a sustainability consultant at the architectural, engineering, interior design and planning firm DIALOG, Mousa says he tries “to centre equity in all my efforts by addressing the impacts of the built environment on humans.” But recent climate events have given his work a greater sense of urgency. “Our built environment was designed for a climate that no longer exists.”

Sophia Mathur

16, Sudbury, ON
activist and lead plaintiff in climate lawsuit

Sophia Mathur can’t vote yet, but she has spent more than half her life making her voice heard on the defining issue of our time. The high-profile climate activist was the first Canadian student to join Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate strike in 2018, has lobbied politicians on a host of environmental matters, and helped convince her hometown of Sudbury to declare a climate emergency in 2019. Perhaps most notably, she is the lead plaintiff in a legal case (Mathur v. Ontario) in which seven Ontario youths are suing the Ontario government for weakening the province’s 2030 climate target, arguing that it violates the fundamental rights of youth and future generations. No climate lawsuit like it has advanced as far in the courts in Canada. Although a judge dismissed their case this year, the group is appealing. “If you are young, it is important that we share our voices about the climate crisis and talk to parents and people that can make those decisions,” Mathur says. “Spread the word about how important it is to vote for climate-concerned politicians and empower people to vote.”

Tyler De Sousa

25, Waterloo Region, ON
co-founder and COO, Circulr

Tyler De Sousa’s first brush with the ethos of circular living came through his grandparents, Portuguese immigrants who understood that nothing is truly “waste.” His grandfather made things out of scrap metal, and his grandmother sewed frayed clothing back to life. “That’s the mentality that brought me to Circulr and that influences our approach,” he says of the start-up he co-founded that works with grocery-store brands to return glass jars dropped off by customers so they can be reused. “We know that everything we call waste could be a valuable resource.” Circulr has worked with 22 brands and facilitated the reuse of 25,000 jars, which helped eliminate 3,932 kilograms of carbon dioxide that would have been expelled in creating new glass. “A lot of measures today are band-aid-style solutions for problems that have been ingrained in our existing systems,” De Sousa says. “What we do at Circulr is try to reimagine our relationship with packaging to change the system itself.”

Zaffia Laplante

26, Toronto
chief strategy officer, SkyAcres Agrotechnologies

As an Indigenous woman from Northern Ontario, Zaffia Laplante grew up spending her summers by the lake or in her grandmother’s garden. “It is something I cherish deeply and has had a large impact on who I am today,” she says. A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Laplantefounded Hempergy, an award-winning hemp-waste insulation start-up, in 2019. Now she is the chief strategy officer of SkyAcres, which is bringing vertical farming technology to rural and First Nations communities to increase food security. SkyAcres has grown more than 40 different types of fruits, vegetables and herbs using 90% less water than conventional farming. It’s also helped drive down the cost of food in pilot locations. “If you have an idea, no matter how big or small, find like-minded people and work together,” she says. “It’s better to create a community of impact than try to do it yourself.”

Lena Courcol

28, Montreal
acquisitions manager, New Market Funds

Growing up in Shanghai, Lena Courcol witnessed a city transform under the forces of globalization. “It drove my curiosity for sustainability in the built environment, our sense of place, social justice and how our neighbourhoods can shape the way we live,” she says. Developing partnerships to establish hybrid solutions to complex problems, like the affordable housing crisis, is her specialty. “This takes a lot of work, but getting everyone in the same room to collaborate on a project is extremely rewarding.” As the acquisitions manager at New Market Funds, she led the fund’s largest transaction to purchase more than 500 units of affordable housing from the private sector through non-profit ownership. More than 800 additional units are in the pipeline to be acquired by the end of the year. Next on her to-do list: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% or more for all of New Market’s building acquisitions. “This work is only just beginning . . . and it’s my role to figure out how to get us there.”

Rita Steele

28, Vancouver
sustainable operations manager and climate action instructor, Simon Fraser University; founder, BIPOC Sustainability Collective

Rita Steele spent much of her childhood and teen years as an avid West Coast backcountry explorer. “My love for the environment was a hobby for a long time,” she says – until she went to Ghana for a three-month trip studying fair trade cocoa. “The producers shared with me how climate change affected their crops and lives. I realized climate change exacerbated the social issues I cared about, and these impacts would continue to worsen.” She pivoted, dedicating herself to climate action. Today, she’s the youngest instructor in Simon Fraser University’s Climate Action Certificate program, and, as SFU’s sustainable operations manager, she’s transforming the school top to bottom. Steele is also the founder of the BIPOC Sustainability Collective, where she’s fostering a capacity-building community for racialized professionals in the sustainability sector. As she notes, “Climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately impact people of colour, yet we are underrepresented in the organizations tackling these issues.”

Marley Alles

27, Toronto
founder, Rax

Once Marley Alles understood the scope of the problem, she set out to fix it. The problem was fast fashion and the crushing amount of waste and pollution created by a culture of insatiable consumption. The fashion industry produces up to 10% of the world’s emissions, and those emissions are expected to surge 50% by 2030. One way to attack that number is through sharing. So Alles created Rax, a peer-to-peer wardrobe rental app that connects people who want to make money off their wardrobes with people who rent the clothes for up to 90% off. In less than a year of operation, Rax has attracted thousands of users. The goal is to chip away at the tonnes of textile waste that end up in Canadian landfills every year. “Anyone can become a sustainability leader,” Alles says. “It’s not about being 100% sustainable. It’s about doing your research and figuring out how to embed eco-friendly swaps in our daily routines.”

Serena Mendizábal

25, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, ON
just-transition lead, Sacred Earth Solar; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

As a Cayuga Panamanian Wolf Clan woman from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Serena Mendizábal thinks about how to centreIndigenous-led climate solutions in her work every day. She co-founded SevenGen Energy, a not-for-profit focused on empowering Indigenous youth in the clean energy sector, bringing together more than 500 youth from across Turtle Island for community building and funding youth-led clean energy projects. Now at Sacred Earth Solar – led and operated by Indigenous women – she shepherds efforts to implement a just transition by bringing solar power to Indigenous communities. “Not only do I advocate towards a just transition through being critical of mainstream climate discourse, but I also implement one by centring Indigenous-led climate solutions through education, research, project development, policy and land-based teachings,” she says. “You need community now more than ever – find your people and start working!”

Rodrigue Turgeon

29, Val-d’Or, QC
national program co-lead, MiningWatch Canada

Growing up in Amos, Quebec, Rodrigue Turgeon saw firsthand the “vicious cycle of destruction” his region was trapped in, depending on an economy almost exclusively based on forestry and mining. He studied science and law to equip himself to defend nature. Since 2017, Turgeon has provided legal advice to First Nations and has helped hundreds of individuals and organizations with environmental mobilizations. He obtained an environmental assessment for a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Quebec, and he led a pro bono team that won a case against Glencore’s Horne Smelter for access to data on its contaminant emissions. “Everyone we support in Canada and around the world is affected by the consequences of the climate crisis. It’s fascinating to see the mining industry trying to capitalize on these disasters to justify even more greenwashed destructive projects,” he says. He urges young people to “doubt the possibility of changing things ‘from within’ polluting industries and their accomplice firms.”

Anna Harman

28, Ottawa
senior advisor for decarbonization strategy, JLL Canada

As a young mechanical engineering grad from Queen’s University, Anna Harman got the chance to help the Government of Canada strategize on making its buildings carbon neutral. “I was immediately hooked by the breadth of impact I could have.” Buildings make up nearly 40% of global emissions, Harman says, “which is why I have dedicated my career to reducing emissions in this industry.” The former vice-president of the Association of Energy Engineers Canada East now leads a team of 10 building engineers and strategic thinkers at JLL to decarbonize commercial real estate portfolios across Canada and around the globe. In her short career, she’s contributed to plans to avoid 18 million tonnes of emissions in more than 2,500 buildings in Canada and another 350 buildings across 80 countries. Harman knows that a mountain of work remains to meet our climate goals, but as a mentor of women in the energy sector, she says staying positive and punching above your weight class are essential: “Push past the boundaries of what people believe is possible for you.”

Jonathan Serravalle

26, Markham, ON
program manager, Competent Boards

In the face of intense scrutiny around corporate sustainability efforts, it’s vital to be well-informed, Jonathan Serravalle says. “Let your stand be the result of your own informed perspective, not just popular sentiment.” Serravalle is laser-focused on driving ethical behaviour in the private sector. After he completed the University of Waterloo’s Master of Climate Change program, he hit the ground running at Competent Boards, where he oversees the climate- and biodiversity-education programs for senior executives and business leaders in 17 countries. “Incorporating ESG considerations into board decisions, I help drive change that doesn’t just boost financial outcomes but also looks out for the planet’s health.” Serravalle had originally planned to study medieval history but changed the course of his own history to dedicate himself to creating a better future. “He is a huge asset to the sustainability movement,” says Competent Boards COO Nancy Wright. “His impact can be felt in boardrooms around the world.”

Emily Kroft

26, Winnipeg
youth engagement and water policy officer, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

There’s a proverb that Emily Kroft grew up hearing: it is not your responsibility to solve the world’s problems, but neither are you free to avoid them. Now it’s become her mantra. “Sustainable policy can be a very daunting field to work in,” Kroft says, especially if you’re trying to change things through individual action. “But if we each do our part, we can get somewhere.” Connecting youth who want to make a difference and empowering them to have a meaningful impact on climate policy is her specialty. Kroft is the creator, coordinator and facilitator of IISD-Next, which has trained more than 500 students and youth in 61 countries on effective engagement in sustainable policy, including advancing a sustainable economy. “Being able to facilitate those connections brings me so much joy,” she says. “I’m one drop in the ocean, but what is the ocean if not a bunch of little drops?”

Carl Botha

28, Toronto
senior manager of sustainability and packaging, Tim Hortons

More than a coffee shop, Tim Hortons is a Canadian institution, serving millions of double-doubles and doughnuts every day. “My work makes each of those visits more sustainable,” Carl Botha says. In his four years with the company, Botha has led changes that helped eliminate 1.3 billion single-use plastics from Tims restaurants annually, as well as 2,600 tonnes of virgin paper packaging. He also led the company in banning persistent PFAS chemicals in food packaging and is currently working on developing a lid that’s recyclable, compostable and 100% plastic-free. The key, he says, is to “always ask ‘Why.’ If you don’t get a good response, keep asking, and you’ll be surprised how many times the answer is ‘Because we’ve always done it this way.’ Whenever I hear that, I know I’ve found a great opportunity to make a change for the better.”

Shakti Ramkumar

27, Surrey, B.C.
senior director of policy and communications, Student Energy

For Shakti Ramkumar, the trick in this time of “frustration, despair and rage” around the climate crisis is to channel that energy. “Youth can take action now, by building our own community energy projects, by galvanizing our peers or fighting for policy change,” says Ramkumar, a skilled climate-science communicator. She leads the communication strategy for Student Energy, a youth-led organization with more than 100,000 followers, and has grown the reach of its open source energy education tool, the Energy System Map, to 17-million users. Since joining Student Energy in 2018, she has helped grow the network to 50,000 youth from more than 120 countries, and launched a Research and Youth Engagement Portfolio that included over 43,000 young voices. She recruited and managed a volunteer team of more than 50 young leaders in energy from around the world to research, write and update energy education pages so that the content is rigorously researched but still written by young people for young people. “We hope that working with young people to get a few of those transformational learning-by-doing experiences under their belts early in their lives will set them up for a lifetime of confident, values-driven service,” she says.

Robert Raynor

27, Toronto
net-zero coordinator, TAS

Toronto, like many Canadian cities, is in a housing crisis. It has to build housing for millions of new residents while simultaneously hitting net-zero targets. That won’t happen without the work of people like Robert Raynor, who is net-zero coordinator for TAS, a real estate developer that aims to have a net-zero carbon portfolio by 2045. He has been working to ensure that project teams are salvaging, sorting and adaptively reusing deconstructed materials from old buildings in new projects. “One of the greatest challenges of our generation is the need to build more while polluting less, and meaningfully achieving anywhere close to ‘net-zero’ requires a pointed and coordinated collective effort,” he says. Raynor’s work calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from new materials and transportation led TAS to divert 21,000 tonnes of concrete, brick and wood from an old building into a new condo project in Toronto. “Your vision of how the world should be will evolve as you grow and learn, but don’t let yourself compromise it,” he says.

Zein Hindawi

29, Toronto
manager of youth engagement, Plan International Canada

Zein Hindawi’s first step toward advocacy came through reflections on her childhood, as a new immigrant to Canada, confronting other children who made fun of her Arabic accent or joked about not being able to hang out with her because she was Muslim. She wished she knew then about where she could turn for support in the face of discrimination. For the last 10 years, her work has been about filling that gap, empowering young people by providing them with the tools, resources and confidence to take action in a meaningful way. She’s created Plan International Youth Councils to support young leaders to start their own initiatives and has travelled to places like China, Senegal, Jordan and Kenya to understand the range of challenges facing youth today. “Achieving one’s advocacy goals requires a collective effort: asking for support from mentors, questioning the status quo, connecting with like-minded changemakers and more,” she says.

Mihskakwan James Harper

28, Winnipeg
business development manager, NRStor Inc.; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

Every project Mihskakwan James Harper works on has a single goal: designing renewable energy sources that benefit Indigenous communities. As a member of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Harper knows his responsibilities as a future ancestor. And as co-chair of SevenGen Energy’s Indigenous youth council, he helped set up a new program called ImaGENation, which mentors Indigenous youth on implementing their own clean energy projects. “My work tries to advocate from a young person’s lens and make it very clear that we have to do more, faster.” To do that, the business development manager for NRStor energy-storage developer says, “We need warriors. That doesn’t only mean people out on the front lines, defending their territories. We also need warriors in boardrooms. We need lawyers. We need engineers to design the energy systems of tomorrow.”

Jessica LeBlanc

28, Vancouver
program director, Foundation for Environmental Stewardship

It’s frustrating to come up against the persistent tokenization of young people as “learners now” and “leaders later,” especially when the “later” is under threat, Jessica LeBlanc says. So her work at the Foundation for Environmental Stewardship (FES) has centred on equipping those young changemakers with the education, resources and support they need to act on climate, never mind the naysayers. “Youth leadership and influence are crucial for our ability to achieve the climate-resilient Canada we all desperately need,” she says. Her team at FES has delivered more than 80 sustainability training workshops to more than 5,500 students and educators across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. “The most significant impacts I’ve witnessed are when students learn and demonstrate empathy for a cause or a group of people that they hadn’t considered before. This culture of kindness is what will bring us a healthier and more sustainable planet.”

Xia (Alice) Zhu

28, Toronto
PhD candidate, University of Toronto

“If you have a vision for your planet, don’t be afraid to make it a reality.” That’s Alice Zhu’s message to young sustainability leaders today, and one she has embodied. She recalls the first time she heard about the North Pacific garbage patch as a high school student. It was such a startling image, a mass of plastic in the ocean, that it drove her to action. She founded Climate Impact Network, her first of three environmental organizations, which has delivered climate-science workshops to more than 300 middle- and high-school students across Ontario. Her doctoral research has shed light on how plastic pollution moves through the environment and identified which ecosystems are affected the most. Her peer-reviewed research has been cited hundreds of times, and she has spoken about it at dozens of conferences, workshops, panels and speaker series. “One person is not going to solve climate change or end plastic pollution,” she notes. “We need everyone working together to overhaul our broken system.”

Emily McIntosh

28, Paris, France
student, Sciences Po Paris; former climate action coordinator, New Glasgow, N.S.

As a kid growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, almost all of Emily McIntosh’s free time was spent playing and learning in nature. Once she turned 18, she spent her summers in the forests and rivers around Ontario’s Temagami Island, where she worked as a backcountry canoe trip guide. These were formative explorations that forged a connection with the natural world that guides her today, as she pursues a master’s in environmental policy at Sciences Po Paris. Before relocating to Europe, Emily was the climate action coordinator in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where she worked to embed climate and sustainability goals into all aspects of the municipality’s operations. She led two community-wide consultations, steered the Climate Action Volunteer program, and co-led the region’s inaugural Pictou County Climate Summit. “The more people involved, perspectives included and needs considered, the more likely we are to develop policies and projects that are meaningful, impactful and grounded in equity and reconciliation,” she says.

Miranda Wang & Jeanny Yao

29, Menlo Park, California
cofounders & CEO/COO, Novoloop

Vancouver high school students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were inspired to take action after visiting a municipal waste station and seeing the staggering amount of plastic trash. “We were shocked to see how much plastic was in the garbage,” Wang says. They had an idea: what if you could use bacteria to break down all that plastic? Yao went on to pursue biochemistry and environmental science at the University of Toronto, while Wang studied molecular biology and engineering entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania. The duo, both daughters of entrepreneurs, reunited to found Novoloop (formerly BioCellection), a start-up that breaks down polyethylene waste to create high-performance materials. Their newest product, Lifecycled, is a thermoplastic made from up to 50% post-consumer waste, and it’s being used in shoemaker On’sCloudprime running shoes. Novoloop’s innovative approach has earned them a spot in the World Economic Forum’s 100 most promising Technology Pioneers of 2022 and raised US$21 million in funding.

Siobhan Finan

26, Whistler, B.C
manager of real estate sustainability, Canada Post

Siobhan Finan is playing a key role in getting one of the biggest and most recognizable Crown corporations to its waste-diversion goal. She led the creation of Canada Post’s first zero-waste baseline, a detailed inventory of all waste generated in operations through durable goods and construction, and she developed the company’s first zero-waste strategy, which serves as a roadmap so it can hit its 90% diversion target by 2030. Canada Post already diverts 67% of its waste from landfill through reduction, recycling and reuse – which represents 27,000 tonnes of material. “It can be challenging working in the field of sustainability, as you often hear fresh news stories about a new environmental disaster,” she says. “I try my best to focus on my slice of the pie where I can make a difference.”

Jordan Lin

23, Toronto
energy and sustainability consultant, Arup; co-founder, ReImagine17

At just 23, Jordan Lin has been busy. His focus? “Empowering the enablers of change with the knowledge, resources, connections and opportunities to achieve scaled impact,” he says. The Beijing-born mechanical engineering grad co-founded University of Waterloo’s Impact Alliance to amplify the UN’s sustainable development solutions before starting the non-profit ReImagine17, raising $150,000 in financing and providing 24 young people paid opportunities to learn about, contribute to and make an impact on sustainability across Canada. Now, through his work as an energy and sustainability consultant at Arup, he’s helped clients slash 8,100 tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions in their buildings. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the size of the world’s problem, Lin says. “Cultivate positive energy that builds a sense of purpose in your work and encourages perseverance to overcome challenges in the face of adversity.”

Ashoke Mohanraj

25, Halifax
author; law student, Dalhousie University

There are a few mottos that Ashoke Mohanraj lives by. One of them comes from his parents, Sri Lankan refugees who escaped the civil war and made it to Canada thanks to the kindness of others. Living in Markham, Ontario, they taught their son to work hard and be kind. “Nothing more and nothing less,” Mohanraj recalls. And so for him, “sustainability has never really been about saving the birds and the bees. It was always about kindness, both towards the planet and people.” He wrote Pollinator Man, a children’s book that teaches readers about different environmental issues and how they can be part of the solution. He has reached more than 5,000 youth through live readings and educational workshops, and another 10,000 through sales of the book. Mohanraj, a former environmental advisor for the RCMP, says the book promotes representation in the sustainability space and encourages people of colour to become engaged. His message to other young people: “Your personal and lived experiences are what make you a leader, so make sure you use that as an asset.”

Brighid Fry

20, Toronto
artist; co-founder, Music Declares Emergency Canada

Growing up in a queer, feminist, climate-focused family of activists, Brighid Fry spent a lot of time at marches and sit-ins as a child. But music was her calling. “My first-ever concert was performing at a Greenpeace fundraiser.” People can be moved emotionally and spiritually by music, Fry says, and that’s often missing from a lot of political activism. Today the singer-songwriter will humbly tell you that she’s not a musician with a lot of celebrity status but she is getting the music industry to sit down and listen through the non-profit she co-founded during the pandemic: Music Declares Emergency Canada. She’s since helped organize the inaugural Canadian Music Climate Summit and has worked with a number of festivals to reduce their carbon footprints. “I think we have really moved the needle,” Fry says. Having just turned 20, she adds, “I feel like I am just getting started.”

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