Leah Gotkin

28, Toronto, ON
Senior manager, climate change – Scotiabank

Leah Gotkin began her career promoting electric vehicle adoption in Canada, then advanced sustainability strategies at Upswing Solutions, with an emphasis on equity and Indigenous engagement. Now at Scotiabank, she drives the bank’s $350-billion climate-finance initiative and supports decarbonization across high-emission sectors.

 

"My courage comes from a belief that climate action can unlock shared value. Everyone has a ‘why,’ and the beauty of working in climate is that competing ‘whys’ can co-exist."

Marissa Louie

25, Toronto, ON
Associate manager, climate reporting – TD Bank Group

Marissa Louie has helped TD Bank Group strengthen its ESG disclosures and has been instrumental in shaping communication around its plan to achieve net-zero by 2050. She led a rigorous review of external disclosure practices to help ensure credible climate-reporting in alignment with regulatory and stakeholder expectations and acted as a lead writer for its the TD and Indigenous Communities in Canada report.

"Sustainability reporting can be a catalyst for change. It’s not just about producing reports – it’s about connecting ambitions, promoting transparency and accountability, and integrating sustainability into business-as-usual."

Samita Rimal

27, Halifax, NS
Specialist, energy transition – Eastward Energy

Samita Rimal became Nepal’s only female graduate of hydropower mechanical engineering in 2019. Today, she leads Nova Scotia’s first green-hydrogen production and blending project. She has also co-founded the Student Energy chapter in Newfoundland.

“Growing up in Nepal’s energy poverty and now leading energy transition projects in Canada, I’ve learned that true progress comes from the courage to question, learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Adrien Roy

29, Toronto, ON
Manager – Quinn and Partners

Adrien Roy has completed more than 60 climate projects focused on baselining greenhouse gas emissions, modelling decarbonization pathways, and building net-zero transition plans and strategies. He has helped set six science-based net-zero targets covering 1.5 million tonnes of GHGs.

“In 2025, the climate battle is shifting from developing new solutions towards implementing existing solutions at scale. It’s become clear that no single person, company or technology will solve the climate crisis independently. The courage needed to win this battle is therefore rooted in collaboration.”

 

Armaan Makhani-Kotadia

22, Waterloo, ON
Youth climate educator and planetary health researcher – McMaster University | The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care | TEDx

At McMaster University, Armaan Makhani-Kotadia has contributed to a campaign to reduce plastic water bottles on campus and install more water refill stations, and he co-founded a fund that awards marginalized students for sustainability initiatives. He is also part of the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, contributing to national networking hubs and training resources to address greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare buildings.

“My courage is guiding me to weave together health, equity and climate action – threads too often kept apart. I bring the skill of transforming climate anxiety into agency, helping young people step into their own power as leaders rather than bystanders.”

Annabelle Liao

24, Vancouver, BC
Project lead | founder and director — Kambo energy group | Project Arrowroot

Annabelle Liao has held roles in cleantech at Foresight Canada, climate finance at Vancity, and community wealth building at Social Innovation Canada. Beyond that, she’s volunteered in grassroots and international organizations advancing global climate action and led a team at ClimaTalk that created resources to de-jargonize international climate negotiations. She also founded and is the director of Project Arrowroot, an NGO funded by the Canada Service Corps and Re-Earth Initiative that paves paths to green careers for young people.

“I place my hope in the 95% of young people around the world who are worried about the impacts of climate change and the 85% of Canadian high school students who want more climate education.”

Sehjal Bhargava

28, Saskatoon, SK
Family medicine physician – University of Ottawa, Harvard University

Sehjal Bhargava’s passion for affecting the social determinants of health has led to a focus on climate change and its impacts on health. She has served as Saskatchewan chair and is currently Ontario co-chair of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. In 2021, she launched PaRx, a program that encourages Saskatchewan physicians to prescribe time in nature to improve patients’ health.

“As a physician, I firmly believe that we are only as healthy as our environment. I am driven by experiences to look outside of the clinic and toward policies that focus on improving the health of people and the planet.”

 

Ali Tapaquon

29, Oskana kâ-asastêki, SK
Principal and founder – Tatâga Inc.

Ali Tapaquon is founder and CEO of Tatâga Inc., a consultancy that integrates traditional ecological knowledge with modern strategy to advance environmental, social and cultural sustainability. Tapaquon developed the Reconciliation Assessment Report – a tool that helps organizations operationalize sustainability through Indigenous rights, knowledge systems and anti-racism.

“My sôhkitêhêwin (courage) comes from the teachings of my culture and Peoples. Our ways are rooted in responsibility and stewardship for the land, waters and skies. I intentionally practise Indigenous strategy to guide organizations in seeing climate action not as a technical fix, but as a relational duty to future generations and to themselves.”

Yazan Zamel

25, Toronto, ON
President – Sustainable Engineer Association 

As an energy-efficiency consultant, energy analyst and now guided projects coordinator at Student Energy, Yazan Zamel champions net-zero energy projects in low-income communities. He has coordinated more than a dozen solar installations in underserved areas, reducing diesel reliance. He is president of the Sustainable Engineers Association at the University of Toronto and founder of the Ray of Hope program that connects refugees and youth with education and jobs.

“I find hope in young people realizing that their voices matter and in communities lighting up with renewable power, which is proof that climate justice is possible when we act together.”

 

Zeina Seaifan

25, Montreal, QC
Scholar-activist – McGill University | Shake Up the Establishment

Zeina Seaifan is a scholar-activist pursuing a PhD at McGill University, researching migration and environmental justice. She now leads the policy committee at Climate Sirens, a feminist climate-justice organization where she mentors 12 women in climate advocacy, and volunteers at Shake Up the Establishment. Seaifan has led national environmental consultations, co-authored policy reports and created accessible educational tools for youth and newcomers.

“Worldwide, climate devastation is informed by the twin flames of colonialism and extraction. We’re advocating for sustainable systems rooted in Indigenous perspectives and other overlooked knowledges.”

Andrea Kilibarda

26, Montreal, QC
 Co-founder, head of client delivery and impact – Climate Finance Advisors

Andrea Kilibarda co-founded a climate-finance advisory firm based in Montreal. To date, her firm has supported the sustainable alignment of approximately $3 billion in assets on behalf of asset owners, collectively targeting a reduction of approximately 500,000 tonnes of financed carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions by 2050. She has also worked with developing countries on plans to align finance with sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We are facing the greatest financial challenge of our time: closing the $7.4-trillion annual climate finance gap. I find hope in the growing movement of purpose-driven leaders building a new investment paradigm that reimagines capital as a force for good.”

Rasul Huseynzade

20, Vancouver, BC
Youth ambassador, sustainability champion, policy adviser and human rights advocate – Jane Goodall Institute – Roots & Shoots

A former UN Development Programme champion and UNICEF youth advocate, Rasul Huseynzade has co-founded various youth-led organizations, including The Children’s Union, a regional Fridays for Future and Youth for Climate Turkiye. He currently serves as a youth adviser to the Jane Goodall Institute, Aga Khan Foundation, It Gets Better Canada and The King’s Trust Canada. He is also a climate ambassador for the World Bank Group.

“I had to go through many difficulties, but I feel like this journey shaped me in every way, because it taught me to be a team, it showed me that change doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t just happen; it made me realize that change is a process.”

Astrid Wilson

27, Bella Bella, B.C.
Economic development coordinator – Heiltsuk Economic Development Corporation

Astrid Wilson is intimately involved in supporting sustainable, culturally grounded economic development in her home community of the Heiltsuk Nation, on the central coast of British Columbia. In 2022, she helped organize the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s Joint Public Advisory Committee gathering, in Victoria, ensuring that Indigenous voices and perspectives were meaningfully included in international environmental dialogues.

Kiemia Rezagian

28, Windsor, on
Engagement and training director – Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment

Kiemia Rezagian has designed and run an advocacy and mobilization program for physicians, spearheaded by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. The program aims to empower physicians to increase their involvement in climate crisis advocacy. To date, it has trained some 150 health professionals, and its success is based in large measure on Rezagian’s leadership.

“Doctors see every day how unhealthy environments lead to sickness and even death. I’m helping them tell these stories so more people see what is at stake.”

 

Paris Liu

24, London, ONTARIO
Master’s student in environmental policy at Sciences Po; former climate change project assistant at ICLEI Canada – Sciences Po 

Paris Liu co-developed McMaster University’s first climate change civil engineering course and co-founded a national working group through the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students to embed climate education into engineering curricula across Canada. She spearheaded zero-waste programs at McMaster, including Coffee to Compost, diverting more than 270 kilograms of waste from landfill, and co-founded Students for Bike Share, a campaign to secure discounted bike share passes for undergrads.

“I am especially passionate about exploring how low-carbon, resilient solutions can tackle both the climate and housing crises, particularly in post-disaster contexts.”

Sarah Machane

29, Montreal, QC
Innovation lead – CASCADES

Sarah Machane works to embed sustainability into the everyday practices of healthcare providers. Through her role with CASCADES (Creating a Sustainable Canadian Health System in a Climate Crisis) as the innovation and regional lead for Quebec, she has helped reduced unnecessary diagnostics and supported initiatives such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions from anesthetic gases and lowering medical imaging’s carbon footprint.

“For me, courage is about consistently showing up, even when we feel out of place and the challenges feel so much bigger than us. My energy goes into community: strengthening networks, trying to break silos and helping people connect across disciplines.”

Fatou Dieng

29, Montreal, QC
Climate solutions lead – Manifest Climate

As an immigrant, Fatou Dieng has worked to elevate the voices and needs of marginalized communities. As a climate strategist, she helps organizations understand and implement climate-related strategies and regulations. She has advocated at the Quebec National Assembly for the creation of a youth committee on climate and sustainability. In Senegal, she helps steward her family’s farm as a site of resilience, food sovereignty and ecological restoration.

“My courage comes from entering spaces that many of my people cannot access. When I speak of a ‘happy ending,’ I mean not only the fight against climate change and its unequal impacts but also our struggles against oppression, injustice, genocide, and racial and social disparities.”

Samuel and Michael Marty

undisclosed/23, Frog Lake First Nation

Samuel: Renewable relations liaison
Michael: Community energy manager

Samuel and Michael Marty are cousins and proud members of Frog Lake First Nation. With the goal to make their community self-sufficient and not reliant on fossil fuels, they have both been working to advance clean energy initiatives. Through capacity built from Indigenous Clean Energy’s programs, Samuel has been leading clean energy projects ranging from net-zero housing design to community communications that showcase his Nation’s green energy initiatives. As clean energy manager, Michael is advancing projects that reduce carbon emissions while fostering economic self-sufficiency and cultural resilience among Indigenous youth.

“We are all inherently stewards of the land. Mother Earth has nurtured us with the love and generosity only a mother can give. Now, it is our turn to return that love, to care for our planet with the same compassion.”

Samuel

“I find hope in seeing our communities not just adapt but thrive, building resilience, cultural pride and sustainable futures together.”

Michael

Julia Wright

21, Montreal, QC
CEO – MycoNurseries

Fungi enthusiast Julia Wright co-founded a “mushroom club” to grow oyster mushrooms from spent coffee grounds. They have transformed the project into MycoNurseries, a registered non-profit that grows and distributes mushrooms to food-insecure communities while providing experiential education to youth about sustainable fungiculture. Wright also works at McGill University’s Office of Sustainability as a Sustainable Labs intern.

​​“The climate crisis can be overwhelming, but I believe that even small actions, when many do them, can make a difference. I place my energy into acting locally and practically."

Sonia Vinogradova

26, Ottawa, ON
Co-founder – Spark Source Consulting

As co-founder of Spark Source Consulting, Sonia Vinogradova builds what she calls triple planetary solutions: projects that treat energy, ecology and economy as one system. She has led two solar installations on farms in Eastern Ontario, saving 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually and cutting energy costs by 40%. She has secured more than $70,000 in public funding for clean energy and is scaling the model through new partnerships.

“The solutions to create a low-waste, low-emissions economy exist, and I’m implementing them.”

Inaam Chattha

22, Toronto, ON
Medical student – Green Mind Canada

As an immigrant who grew up in a remote Albertan town, Inaam Chattha understands how climate change, mental health and access to resources are deeply connected. He founded Green Mind Canada to create space for young people to talk about climate anxiety. He also wrote three children’s books that help children understand climate emotions and feel empowered to act. He is an Ocean Wise ambassador.

“My courage is guiding me to nurture spaces where young people can share their fears about climate change and feel empowered to act.”

Tianna Philippot

28, Teulon, Manitoba
Founder – Renewable Roots

Tianna Philippot is from rural Manitoba (Treaty 1, homeland of the Red River Métis Nation) and largely credits her connection with the environment to her Indigenous identity. Philippot is the founder of Renewable Roots, an organization dedicated to connecting her community to accessible and sustainable agriculture. Her wheelchair-accessible greenhouse will operate on clean energy in a repurposed container, demonstrating the interconnected relationship of food and energy sovereignty.

“I am continuously understanding the depth of the interconnected relationship between personal and climate resilience. Each exists because of unwavering determination and thoughtful navigation through pain, grief, passion and desire for balance.”

Jumanah Khan

29, London, ON
Owner and director; research associate – White Egret Consulting; Dalhousie University

As program manager for ALUS (Alternative Land Use Services) Elgin, Jumanah Khan led the restoration of more than 400 acres of environmentally sensitive land, managed substantial budgets and coordinated with diverse partners to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem benefits. Her efforts include the diversion of an estimated four tonnes of total phosphorus from Lake Erie and its tributaries. 

“My skills lie in translating data into narratives – helping transdisciplinary knowledge and worldviewsspark community-driven action.”

Clara Phillips

25, Iqaluit, Nunavut
Development project manager – Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation

Clara Phillips is the development project manager for Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation, based in Iqaluit – Nunavut’s first 100% Inuit-owned renewable-energy developer. Phillips is currently managing the construction of the Anuriqjuak Nukkiksautiit Project, a wind and battery energy storage project located in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. The goal of the project is to offset the community’s diesel fuel use by 70% while securing a revenue-sharing agreement with the Sanikiluarmiut people.

“I prioritize listening, an undervalued but essential skill in creating meaningful change and supporting community-led clean energy projects..”

Lara Varty

26, Courtenay, B.C
Coordinator, sector innovation – Foresight Canada

Lara Varty is an integral part of Foresight Canada’s B.C. Net Zero Innovation Network that is helping the province hit its target of a 40% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. She has supported the development of four cleantech innovation clusters centred on mining, water, forest bioeconomy and transportation. Her efforts have contributed to the network’s key accomplishments, including securing $78 million in private cleantech investment, forming 100 new partnerships and launching 26 projects with Indigenous participation.

“Creating space for honest and open dialogue about what barriers are in place in addressing climate issues is the first step in creating change.”

Lily YangLiu

16, White Rock, B.C.
Co-founder/high school student – DMUN Foundation

Lily YangLiu is deputy executive director of the DMUN Foundation, a youth-led, non-profit advocacy platform. She co-developed a climate curriculum with university professors and early childhood educators and has delivered workshops to students across British Columbia. In 2022, she launched Daily Climate News, a bilingual social media series engaging followers in China across WeChat and Xiaohongshu. 

“I try to create spaces where advocacy is not just about sacrifice or urgency, but about community, creativity and resilience, recognizing that we are human, not machines.”

Gordon So

29, Toronto, on
Head of sustainability – Relocalize

Gordon So is an integral part of Relocalize, which creates microfactories that are closer to distribution points, eliminating middle-mile transportation and reducing cold storage needs. So spearheaded Relocalize’s carbon impact analysis in collaboration with the Oxia Initiative.

“Courage, to me, is proving that climate solutions don’t have to wait until 2050. They can transform industries today. I find hope in knowing that when better options exist for both business and the planet, they will always win.”

Alison Gu

29, Burnaby, B.C
City councillor – City of Burnaby

At 24, Alison Gu became the youngest city councillor elected in Burnaby, the third-largest municipality in British Columbia. She spearheaded a policy in her early days at city council that ensures all climate change motions include an equity lens, support reconciliation and be nature-based where possible. Since then, Gu has sat on a task force seeking to reduce building emissions with retrofits and pushed for infrastructure improvements to deal with severe weather events. 

“I place my energy in the fights that teeter the line in being attainable and bold, realistic and impactful. I find hope mostly in loving community, but also in the small wins, knowing that every one has a real impact on people.”

Kimia Shafighi

27, Montreal, QC
CEO and founder – Biocene

Through Biocene, Kimia Shafighi is tackling the urgent issue of harmful algae blooms, which are exacerbated by climate change and threaten water quality, public health and biodiversity in urban and rural aquatic environments. Her innovation removes these blooms from the water and transforms them into valuable biomass, such as biofuel, bioplastics and biocoke, turning a major environmental hazard into a circular economic opportunity.

“Each step forward, no matter how small, reinforces my belief that change is possible. In the end courage is knowing it might not work, but doing it anyway, and doing it together.”

Drew Bernard

28, Lennox Island, P.E.I.
Project manager and housing administrator, L’nu Energy – L’nu Energy

Drew Bernard is a proud Mi’kmaq leader and the energy lead for Lennox Island First Nation, where he is guiding the development of multiple utility-scale solar and wind projects. As co-founder and VP of Awtij Energy, a member of P.E.I.’s Net Zero Advisory Committee, and project manager and housing administrator at L’nu Energy, Bernard has been unlocking energy solutions for homes, fleets and infrastructure across Atlantic Canada.

“I find hope in the rising strength of Indigenous voices across Turtle Island and beyond, and I place my energy everyday in uplifting Indigenous values on the world stage.”

The post Creative defiance appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Loach says she wrote It’s Not That Radical because she felt it was missing from the climate movement canon. She has been surprised, and encouraged, to see who it reaches: young people have told her they have switched career paths as a result, philanthropic organizations set up new funds for climate justice work, and a corporate CEO was moved enough to discuss it during therapy sessions. 

“We can have something better, and it’s time for us to try different ways of getting that,” she told Corporate Knights senior editor Natalie Alcoba in a wide-ranging interview. It has been condensed for space.

Natalie Alcoba: If you don’t mind, maybe we can start with where you are. Where are you travelling from and where are you going? 

Mikaela Loach: I’m coming from the Elmley Nature Reserve. It’s one of the places in the U.K. that has been actively rewilded. It was really interesting to be there. It was a trip with Finisterre, an outerwear brand, which stocked my book in their stores. It’s bizarre that a surfing brand has stocked a non-fiction book, but it’s also been cool because people have found out about the book. And I’m just heading back home, which is somewhere else in the U.K. 

NA: What is your season like? Tell me a little bit about what you’ve got going on broadly. 

ML: I co-run a school of organizing with Jess Mally [an anti-racism educator] for young Black people in London. It’s on Black liberation and climate justice. It basically exists to try to get people the tools they need to organize around these issues and build them up, so hopefully they will go out and organize many more people. I’m really excited about that. The whole thing is in person, which is also really lovely. It’s called Awethu, which comes from the South African anti-apartheid chant “Amandla! Awethu!” – which means “The power is ours.” “Awethu” means “it’s ours”; we want this school to be everyone’s who is a part of it. 

NA: How did you come up with the incubator? 

ML: I have been organizing in the climate justice movement for about 10 years now. In the U.K., the climate movement is disproportionately white middle class and is not representative of the people who have been most impacted by this crisis. And that has a really big impact on what solutions are being prioritized, or even seen as solutions. And also, it means that a lot of Black people feel they can’t be in these spaces. I struggled a lot in the climate movement with that. 

We make it really clear [to applicants of the incubator] that we don’t really care loads about how impressive you are. What we care about is if you care about your community and want to do something about it. 

NA: I’m going to ask the most obvious question that I’m sure you’ve been asked many times. Which is: why did you write It’s Not That Radical? 

ML: Great question. No, but really, I’m grateful to be asked – because sometimes people don’t ask. The main reason was that I just felt that the book I wanted to do didn’t exist. I think there are a lot of really brilliant books on climate justice that are written towards the movement only and that use language that only people in the movement will understand. They are brilliant and great, but they’re not books that I can give to my friend who I grew up with who hasn’t had the same life experience I had or the same educational experience that I had.

I wanted to write something that would feel like a friend was talking to you about this and they’re not trying to sound smart and they’re not trying to look down on you, but instead it’s a conversation between people that feels like an embrace. It won’t be heavy in jargon whilst still retaining a lot of research and the core of the politics. I think it’s very possible for us to make strong, clear, good arguments that are still accessible. I wanted to compel the reader to do something, and not just to feel better for knowing more. 

NA: A lot of what I took away from the book was trying to create an understanding that in the midst of something so overwhelming, there is hope. Is that something that is for you a daily challenge – to look for that? 

ML: Definitely. So, today at this retreat they asked me to say a bit about storytelling. In that particular moment, I felt quite overwhelmed with grief, and it felt quite difficult to answer that question then. I answered it by being honest – which is that the way we tell the best stories is to be honest. If you’re talking about hope but you’re not being honest with yourself about the deep grief you feel about the world and what is being lost, then it’s not going to resonate with people because it’s not real. How we get real hope is by understanding where we are now. So I ended up talking about grief in that moment. The fact that children are being starved to death and bombed in Palestine. I feel such deep grief, sometimes I want to fall into it and let it overcome me. But I know that is not the solution. To have hope doesn’t require us to put blinders on and not see what is going on around us. We also need to see how change has happened before and realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

“To have hope doesn’t require us to put blinders on and not see what is going on around us.”

NA: I find when we go really micro, even just through a conversation, you can feel something shifting. Is that how you approach it? 

ML: Yeah, I do a mix of the micro and the macro. On social media, I am providing education for 10 million people a month who see my videos for a fleeting moment. Whereas at Awethu – and what I actually love about community organizing – is that it’s about the relationships. This is also the difficult part of community organizing because as people, we can be very annoying. Let’s be real. And being in community means being okay with being annoying. I think that’s the only way we’ll change things, if we know our neighbours and have these conversations. Social media obviously has a role, but it’s not everything. Something we need to all learn is that it’s OK to disagree and it’s OK to listen to each other and not only try to convince that person but listen to what they’re saying. That’s how you’re going to convince people. Make them feel like they are being heard. If people feel dismissed, they’re not really going to hear what you’re saying. 

NA: I assume, also, you can’t really get to a more just world without being OK in that discomfort of not agreeing. 

ML: One hundred percent. I was in New York because Bill Gates asked me to speak [at his foundation’s annual event]. [Loach disagrees with philanthrocapitalism and billionaires controlling the solutions we pursue.] What I said in that speech was that I felt deeply uncomfortable being in this space, saying these words that would not be received best in this space. And I knew they would feel uncomfortable in the audience hearing things that disrupted their world view. But I hoped with this shared discomfort that we could all be transformed through this conversation. 

NA: Even beyond discomfort, you talk about disrupting and damaging the industries that are causing the crisis. What kind of call to action is that? 

ML: I think tackling the climate crisis in a way that the ruling class are very happy with us doing so has not worked. The climate crisis has gotten significantly worse. There are actually parts of it that we cannot reverse. There are parts that we can. In the Niger Delta, the life expectancy is between 41 and 45 years of age because of the damage that Shell has done to the area. My friend was there recently and sent me photos of the water that people have to drink there, and it is literally oil. And that is because of Shell’s extraction. But we have been too nice to Shell for too long. These actions are not respectable and they’re not OK. I’m very supportive of actions, especially in the face of the genocide – we’ve seen dockworkers use their unions [to refuse] to board Israeli goods that will be used in the genocide. Those kinds of actions are disruptive and say we will not be complicit. And we will actually cause you financial damage so you will stop this. Obviously, these corporations want us to ask nicely because they can just write us a new greenwashed ad campaign that tells us that they’re not actually fossil fuel companies, they’re renewable-energy companies, even though less than 6% of their operations are renewables. 

“What is being asked of you is to be a little bit brave and to every day be a little bit brave again.”

NA: Do you think we are closer to understanding and disrupting the idea that climate change isn’t the great equalizer but, as you put it in your book, the great multiplier, enhancing inequality? Has that message gotten through? 

ML: Within the climate movement, I think there has been a significantly dramatic shift. Outside these movement spaces, I think there’s starting to be. I’ve gone and given keynotes across Europe and the U.K., and it will be in those spaces that people come up and say, “I’ve never thought about the climate crisis that way. I’ve never thought about its connection to colonialism or that we aren’t all in the same boat, we’re in the same storm.” 

NA: And understanding that is necessary for change to happen? 

ML: The reason that I write about things like the Overton window, the window of possibility, what is perceived as possible, is because these things have material impacts. What the majority of people believe is true impacts what becomes possible or true, because it makes policy possible or change possible because it is well received. When transformational changes or revolutions have happened, they have been possible because a wide amount of people understood why they were necessary or felt that change was needed. 

Organizing means that communities learn that when the conditions are right, they know what to do. So, say, for example, there is an immigration raid in your area; if your community is organized, then they can prevent your neighbour from being taken. That has happened many times in the U.K. That is happening in the U.S. But that only happens if a community understands why they should care about their neighbours and then organizes to know who to call and what to do in that situation. We need to understand both the why and the how. 

NA: What is your message to young people? 

ML: What is being asked of you is not to do right now the thing that seems absolutely, petrifyingly, terrifying and risky to do. What is being asked of you is to be a little bit brave and to every day be a little bit brave again. And to always try and push yourself outside of your comfort zone. You’re not being asked to become someone different or be so far away from who you really are. We need a diverse movement with different perspectives and different ideas and different skills. And what now might seem risky and scary, 10 years from now may seem comfortable to you because you’ve been pushing yourself to be a little bit brave every time. I think that’s how we actually create change.

The post How to be a little bit brave appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant,” the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.

Now, more than a dozen youth from Wisconsin, including Indigenous youth, are filing a lawsuit against the state’s utility regulator to force it to consider climate change when evaluating new fossil fuel projects.

Currently, Wisconsin law blocks the Public Service Commission from taking air pollution – including carbon dioxide emissions – into consideration during the permitting process. Fifteen children and teenagers, ages eight to 17, filed a lawsuit Friday against the utility regulator alleging that the law violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty.

The case is part of a growing climate litigation movement led in part by Indigenous youth. Twelve-year-old Miahlin B., who goes by her tribal name Waazakone, and her three siblings joined the lawsuit because climate change is eroding their traditional ways of life. The children harvest wild rice, which is sacred to their communities, but warming temperatures are making it harder to grow rice successfully. They tap sugar maple trees to make maple sugar, but last year came up dry in part because of a shorter winter season. They fish for walleye and sturgeon, but both fish populations are shrinking as waters warm.

Waazakone told Grist she wants to protect her community for future generations. She describes herself as a water protector, explaining that caring for water is part of her responsibility as a female member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. “We need the government to understand that clean water and air is a human right and our most valuable resource,” she said.

The youth plaintiffs are also challenging a Wisconsin law that prohibits the Public Service Commission from mandating more renewable energy from local utilities. Right now, about three-quarters of the state’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. That’s on par with the national average but lags far behind states like South Dakota, where more than 75% of its state energy production comes from renewables.

The plaintiffs are represented by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a Madison-based environmental non-profit law centre, and Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based non-profit dedicated to advancing youth-led climate litigation. The latter is perhaps best known for its successful litigation against the state of Montana in Held v. Montana. In December, the state’s Supreme Court affirmed that Montana youth have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” and concluded that the state should take greenhouse gas emissions into account when considering new fossil fuel projects. The state hasn’t considered any new oil and gas projects since then, so it remains to be seen what that will look like in practice.

“Wisconsin doesnʻt have any fossil fuel extraction like Montana, but they do continue to have an electricity sector that’s dominated by fossil fuels. Itʻs the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” said Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger, who is representing the Wisconsin plaintiffs.

The non-profit has filed dozens of lawsuits in the United States over the last decade and a half, including one against the Trump administrationʻs reversal of former president Joe Bidenʻs climate policies. Last year, they helped secure a landmark settlement in Hawaii with the case Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, where youth plaintiffs contended that the state’s commitment to expanding infrastructure to support gas-powered cars and disregard for cleaner options violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” There, the state agreed to develop a plan to zero out carbon emissions from its transportation sector by 2045.

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Slate of lawsuits open new avenues of hope for climate campaigners

As the legal fight against climate action heats up, here are five cases to watch

In Wisconsin, the constitutional right to a clean environment isn’t as explicit as in Montana or Hawaii, where there is language in the state constitution spelling out that right. Wisconsin Democrats tried unsuccessfully earlier this year to add that language to the state constitution. But the attorneys in this new case are arguing that a stable climate system is necessary to achieve the constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, says lawsuits like this take on new salience in light of the Trump administration’s rollback of climate action. “It’s even more important to bring these cases now given the current state of the United States’ stance on climate change in general,” she says.

A spokesman from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission declined to comment on pending litigation.

As state leaders grapple with mounting costs of flood recovery and plead for federal assistance, Waazakone hopes that her lawsuit forces them to take climate change seriously. “I want the state of Wisconsin to realize that you cannot allow businesses and people to continue to erode our futures,” she says.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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THE CITY ELECTRIFIER

Ali Husnain

27, St. John’s, NL

Sustainability coordinator – City of St. John’s

Growing up in Pakistan during an energy crisis, Ali Husnain lived through frequent blackouts and limited electricity access. “Witnessing the disproportionate impacts of climate change – floods, earthquakes and heat waves – deepened my resolve,” he says. While studying electrical engineering, he got excited about renewable energy. “I knew I wanted to dedicate my career to sustainability.” Just three years after immigrating to Canada, the sustainability coordinator for St. John’s has already secured a$6 million in funding for sustainability and climate change projects and is overseeing the deep retrofit of 101 affordable housing units, as well as a corporate energy-efficiency project that will cut 11% of the city’s footprint. “Cities are where climate action truly impacts daily life.” Husnain’s approach to sustainability is driven by the belief that “drop by drop makes the ocean.” While individual efforts, like electrifying a single building, may seem small from the outside, he knows his small team at the City of St. John’s is driving meaningful action and making the coastal city more resilient.

THE RECIPROCAL COLLABORATOR

Freddie Huppé Campbell

28, The Kootenays, BC
Director, Energy & Climate program
Indigenous Clean Energy

“It is not possible to decolonize a colonial system; therefore, new systems must be created that uphold sovereignty,” Freddie Huppé Campbell says. With the teachings of a rural and mountainous upbringing sewn into her ways of being, Huppé Campbell, a proud Two-Spirit Michif, works to uphold reciprocal relationships with human and non-human kin in everything she does. Lately, that has focused on empowering Indigenous communities around the globe to seek control of their own renewable-energy solutions. She established the Energy & Climate program at Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), fostering collaborations and training with communities and organizations in Colombia, Ecuador, New Zealand and Australia. She has also developed ICE’s National Hub, leading policy endeavours at the federal, provincial and territorial levels. “There are many things I dream of doing that do not fit on a linear timeline. Whatever is ahead, I intend to greet it warmly, nourish what needs to grow and adapt as needed.”

THE RENEWABLE-ENERGY CATALYST

Jasmine Lyn

28, Scarborough, ON
Program manager, Women in Renewable Energy
Project lead, City of Toronto

Jasmine Lyn found her inspiration to safeguard the future by looking to the past, and the knowledge that ancient civilizations held about how to steward the riches of the earth. Equity and equality are at the heart of Lyn’s work. She helped Women in Renewable Energy, an organization that started in Toronto, broaden its reach across the globe, launching chapters in the United Kingdom and Iceland that enable women and underrepresented groups to network and grow their professional skills. In Toronto’s municipal government, Lyn has been focused on meeting the city’s net-zero goal by 2040, working with operators of dozens of affordable housing buildings to help connect them to funding, resources and opportunities for green retrofits, which have lowered energy bills. Prior to that, she led the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy in Orillia, Ontario, implementing new EV chargers and undertaking an energy-management analysis of city facilities.

THE ELECTRICAL FIREBRAND

Anik Rahman

29, Toronto
Vice-chair, Memorial University of Newfoundland; advisor, Independent Electricity
System Operator

Anik Rahman witnessed firsthand how unfair climate change can be, seeing his homeland of Bangladesh battered by flooding and cyclones when it’s responsible for only 0.56% of global carbon emissions. Rahman graduated from Newfoundland’s Memorial University as a licensed engineer in 2017; by 2021, he was one of three Canadians appointed to the World Energy Council’s Future Energy Leaders program. He is now vice-chair of Memorial University, where he oversees the university’s emissions- and carbon-footprint-reduction efforts, including an electrification project that is removing emissions equivalent to taking 6,200 cars off the streets. Rahman is also an advisor for the Independent Electricity System Operator, the not-for-profit that operates Ontario’s electrical grid, managing the grid-reliability contracts and designing procurement mechanisms for renewables and non-emitting resources.

INNOVATORS

THE CLEANTECH INCUBATOR

Morgan Lehtinen

& Sebastian Alamillo

29, Kingston, ON; 24, Kingston, ON
Co-founders, RXN Hub

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig ruptured in 2010, a 15-year-old Morgan Lehtinen watched the disaster unfold and knew her future would be shaped by it. “That propelled me to spin out my PhD research into a company to clean contaminated water systems,” she says. Always destined for science, Lehtinen hit a roadblock in graduate school, frustrated by how much groundbreaking research “never leaves the lab.” Fast forward to today: Lehtinen, a serial entrepreneur, is the co-founder and executive director of RXN Hub, a $15-million, 65,000-square-foot facility designed to pilot and scale sustainable chemical innovations. She and co-founder Sebastian Alamillo, the director of strategic development, have helped more than 100 start-ups navigate commercialization; now they’re bringing vital research and development facilities online, aiming to create more than 400 green jobs over the next three years. “We built the kind of place I wish I had as a founder,” Lehtinen explains. Alamillo echoes this vision: “Chemistry got us into this climate mess, and chemtech will get us out.”

THE SEAWEED ECO-PRENEUR

Majid Hajibeigy

29, surrey, BC
Founder & CEO
Canadian Pacifico Seaweeds Ltd

At 23, Majid Hajibeigy decided to return to his family’s farming roots, but his fields would be the crashing shores of the Pacific; his crop, seaweed. Since then, the founder of Canadian Pacifico Seaweeds has worked with researchers, chefs and food scientists to create products like seaweed gel for locally made hand sanitizer in the pandemic and has partnered with Konscious Foods, a plant-based seafood brand, to put new plant-based sushi products in the marketplace. “My goal is also to unite academia and industry in a powerful alliance, harnessing groundbreaking research and translating it into practical, commercially viable solutions.” The work hasn’t been without its challenges: “Recent environmental changes, such as rising ocean temperatures and acidification, have severely impacted seaweed production.” But Hajibeigy’s company has raised more than $3.5 million to fund projects like KelpSpat, which increases seaweed cultivation productivity by up to 400%, boosting its carbon-storing potential. “I aim to revolutionize the way we approach conservation by creating a scalable, for-profit conservation business model.”

THE INVENTIVE COLOURIST

Iris Redinger

26, Toronto/Waterloo, ON
CEO and founder
Material Futures

Sometimes, climate solutions can be found just by looking at our surroundings differently. You could say that is how Iris Redinger stumbled on one. The University of Waterloo architecture grad founded Material Futures, which uses microorganisms to produce all-natural, biodegradable dyes, instead of chemical ones. Or, as Redinger puts it, turning microbes in food waste “into miniature dye factories” that produce vegan colourants that are longer-lasting than plant-based dyes. The technology is applicable across industries like food, cosmetics, fashion and packaging, Redinger says. “Understanding how different offshoots from one industry can be used as an input in another industry requires interdisciplinary thinking,” she says. “If we want to address our climate crisis effectively, we need to start thinking holistically and not in silos.” Her idea is already turning heads, earning her a Mitacs Entrepreneur Award, which honours students, professors and partner organizations, and some $1.5 million in financing so she can scale up her waste-diversion process to reach her goal of diverting 500,000 kilograms of waste from treatment and landfill by 2030.

THE WASTE WIZARDS

Prishita Agarwal

& Abhiudai Mishra

22, 23, Vancouver
Co-founders, Mosa Technologies

Prishita Agarwal and Abhi Mishra first met in high school at a boarding school in South India. “We became friends and discovered our shared interest in social impact,” Agarwal says. Coincidentally, they both decided to study at the University of British Columbia. “When I moved from India, where resources were scarce, to Canada, a land of abundance, I noticed a stark contrast in the public mindset,” Agarwal says. It was at a house party, seeing glass bottles being tossed in the trash, that the idea for Mosa was born. Since then, they’ve kept 20,000 bottles from landfills by upcycling them into home decor products. “While plastic is often highlighted [as a problem], 78% of recyclable glass ends up in landfills,” Mishra explains. The Mosa founders see business as a force for good: “By integrating sustainability into the core of our operations,” Mishra says, “we can prove that it is possible to be both profitable and responsible.”

THE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SCHOLAR

Janna Wale

28, Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC)
Indigenous research and partnerships lead Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions

The salmon had a message. As a child in British Columbia, and a member of the Gitanmaax First Nation, Janna Wale became attuned to the changing climate as she observed how much harder it was for her family to harvest salmon. She decided early on that she wanted to help ensure that future generations would be able to continue those and other traditions that are rooted in territory. As a policy advisor for the Canadian Climate Institute, the climate researcher demonstrated how Indigenous research can be integrated into climate policy. Her report with the Yellowhead Institute, Bad Forecast, exposed the lack of meaningful Indigenous inclusion in climate-adaptation policy-making in Canada. She is also a CBC columnist and spoke at COP28 in Dubai as a representative of SevenGen, a collective of Indigenous youth energy leaders. “We need more young leaders, more diverse knowledges and more Indigenous people included in policy- and decision-making,” she says. “We are leaders, we are scientists, and we are ready to contribute and make change.”

THE EMPOWERERS

Leïla Cantave

& Tyjana Connolly

27, 26, Montreal & Calgary
Co-founders, Black Eco Bloom

After meeting while interning at COP26 in 2021, Leïla Cantave and Tyjana Connolly couldn’t ignore the reality that they saw no other Black youth at the summit. Frustration quickly turned into action: in 2022 they founded Black Eco Bloom to empower Black women to take on leadership roles in the fight against climate change. “Our work is about more than just environmental sustainability; it’s about redefining who is seen and ensuring that the experiences and knowledge of marginalized communities are not just included but prioritized,” says BEB chair Cantave, who has also been the Quebec lead with Climate Action Network Canada since 2022. Connolly is BEB’s executive director as well as a program officer at United Nations Canada and the co-author of Green Is Not White: Giving Voice to Indigenous, Black, and Racially Marginalized Workers in the Environmental Justice Movement. She explains that BEB has grown to provide guidance on green job pathways and funding for community resilience projects. “This work is very daunting to do alone; there’s so much power in community.” 

THE CONVERSATION SETTER

Nic Raytek

25, Toronto
Senior manager, sustainable programs
GLOBE Series

Nic Raytek wasn’t expecting her internship at a think tank to upend her worldview. But as she sifted through data on global emissions, she recalls, “It was clear that reaching 1.5°C wasn’t going to happen.” That sparked a deep climate anxiety that stayed with her – until she found a way to channel it into action. “I decided that by pursuing a career in sustainability, I could actively shape a more certain, sustainable future for all.” Now, as senior manager of sustainable programs at GLOBE (Global Opportunities for Business and the Environment) Series, Raytek is steering the conversation on sustainability at the highest levels. Whether through her programming at GLOBE Forum in Vancouver, GLOBExCHANGE in Toronto or helping with global events like the Canada pavilion of COP27, COP28 and soon COP29, thousands of leaders and innovators have walked away from her programs armed with the connections and insights to drive change.

THE GREEN CREATIVE

Smiely Khurana

26, Vancouver
founder of The Sustainable Act

As the former sustainability lead at Reel Green, Smiely Khurana was called “the face of the sustainability movement in Hollywood North,” helping major studios and films of all sizes in British Columbia shrink their carbon footprints. In 2020, the creative powerhouse also launched The Sustainable Act, which began as a podcast on greening the film industry and has expanded to empower communities to go greener with tools, workshops and events. Her next act hits even closer to home for Khurana. She’s launching the Climate Wellness Network, offering resources and support for those struggling with climate anxiety. “The 2021 floods in my hometown of Abbotsford caused by an atmospheric river have profoundly influenced my work. Seeing my community struggle through such devastation brought my climate anxiety to its peak.” Khurana says she’s committed to leveraging the power of media not just to amplify environmental efforts, but to ensure that young people have the emotional support needed to navigate an uncertain future.

POLICY PUSHERS

THE GOVERNMENT WHISPERER

Shoshana Pasternak

28, Toronto
Senior associate, government affairs
Invenergy

Shoshana Pasternak had heard the utopic stories of what electrification could do for our economies, our planet and the people on it, but every plan she encountered came with a caveat. “That ‘but’ told me a transition was possible,” she recalls, “but we need to support these innovations with systems that reduce risk.” As policy director for Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Electrification, Shoshana brought forward policies that advanced hundreds of megawatts of renewable power, including rooftop solar, and expedited the build-out of transmission lines in the province, reaching more clean energy projects. Now overseeing government relations at Invenergy in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, she has advanced more than 30 renewable-energy projects, including wind, solar and energy storage. “Even getting one clean energy project off the ground can power a small town – it’s about those tangible impacts,” she says.

THE PMO INFLUENCER

Harry Orbach-Miller

29, Toronto/Ottawa
Policy advisor
Prime Minister’s Office, Government of Canada

Harry Orbach-Miller is used to being the youngest person in the room. Often, that room is at the centre of decision-making in Canada. For more than five years, he has helped shape public policy as an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “I feel incredibly privileged to be able to play a small role in the central nervous system of the federal government’s policy-making process,” says Orbach-Miller, who is one of the youngest members of the Prime Minister’s Office. “Working in politics can be a frenetic experience at the best of times,” he notes, so he tries to focus on what he can control, putting his energy into areas where he can actually move the needle. His work on the Electoral Participation Act helped expand advance polls and ensure on-campus voting. He helped to develop Canada’s Public Transit Fund and the $6-billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund and to secure $500 million for the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings program, initiatives that are designed to drive climate action and create more sustainable cities. Orbach-Miller also helped steer $77 million in relief funding to Lytton, the B.C. village that was devastated by wildfires in 2022.

THE JUST-TRANSITION WARRIOR

Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang

26, Oxford, UK
Policy analyst, sustainable finance & just transition, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment

Among the mantras that drive Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang is one from Audre Lorde: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” That sums up how Wang, raised in White Rock, B.C., views her own work, which sits, as she describes it, at the intersection of finance and climate justice. “My pursuit of climate justice work is informed by my womanhood, my race, my youth and as a daughter of first-generation immigrants, raised in the diaspora,” she says. She specializes in climate policy and finance, advising investors and governments on an equitable transition to net-zero. She was the lead author on the U.K. Transition Plan Taskforce’s just-transition guidance, serves as a member of the UN Expert Group on Resource Management and leads the Commonwealth Youth Climate Change Network. This year, the PhD candidate at the University of Oxford co-authored a UN report on intergenerational equity in resource management. “Advocacy and activism exist on a spectrum,” she notes. “Many of the most tedious, unglorified tasks are what secure the movement and a better outcome for all.”

THE NET-ZERO DOCTOR

Owen Dan Luo

25, Montreal
Resident physician, internal medicine
McGill University Health Centre

Owen Dan Luo has seen the health impacts of climate change, land degradation and biodiversity loss up close as a medical student treating patients at hospitals and clinics around Montreal. That’s why he’s made it his mission to raise awareness of the impact that healthcare has on the climate crisis and prepare physicians and trainees to decarbonize the Canadian healthcare system. “Our healthcare system is responsible for approximately 5% of our nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions – twice as much as the aviation industry,” he notes. As a past co-chair of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students’ Health and Environment Adaptive Response Task Force, Luo developed national standards for medical education on planetary health. He founded Project Green Healthcare/Project Vert la Santé, which provides funding and facilitates mentorships to launch sustainability projects in Canadian healthcare. So far, more than 100 medical students from 14 medical schools in nine provinces have launched projects, from a personal-protective-equipment recycling program in Saskatoon to composting programs in Trois-Rivières.

THE FOOD-SYSTEM FIXER

Allison Penner

28, Saskatoon, SK
Executive director
Reimagine Agriculture

Allison Penner never imagined that a college paper would change her life. In her second year of an environmental governance degree, she uncovered a startling truth: more than 80% of global fisheries were either fully exploited or collapsing. “I had no idea the food system was in such crisis,” she recalls. Even more shocking? Neither did her classmates. It catalyzed Penner’s commitment to fixing the food system. She went on to found Reimagine Agriculture, a non-profit dedicated to systemic change in the sector, which raised more than $250,000 to tackle food-system challenges, and helped shape new legislation to combat food waste while leading a collaboration with law schools. “We started as a small group of friends with a dream, and now we’re making real change,” she says. Whether advocating for cultivated meat or advancing policy reform, Penner is a rising leader in Canada’s sustainable food movement, ensuring that we can continue to nourish a growing global population.

THE MONEY GREENERS

THE ECO-FINANCE MAVERICK

Mégane Mandruzzato

29, Quebec City
Director of sustainability
iA Financial Group

In three short years, Mégane Mandruzzato rose to a leadership position in one of the largest insurance and wealth management groups in Canada, becoming the iA Financial Group’s first director of sustainability. “Her strategic influence contributed not only to the creation of this position, but also to the establishment of a dedicated sustainability team,” her nominee says. Mandruzzato knows that while financial institutions might serve as the backbone of Canada’s economy, their investment portfolios could contribute to 90% of greenhouse gas emissions. So far she has spearheaded decarbonization targets for a $13-million asset portfolio and 38 buildings across Canada. But her proudest achievement is helping to create a “bridge between the academic and professional worlds.” In addition to her award-winning research on integrating sustainable finance values into insurance companies, she helped forge a partnership for a research chair in sustainable finance at HEC Montréal.

THE GREEN BANKER

Mitch McEwen

27, Montreal
Senior manager, Enterprise Sustainable Finance
TD Bank Group

Mitch McEwen had always envisioned a career for himself in conventional finance. But studying abroad while the Paris Agreement was being adopted changed everything. “Realizing that financial systems could support environmental goals and sustainable development inspired me.” Now, McEwen is at the forefront of sustainable finance, wielding his influence to make change happen. Since joining TD, he has spearheaded the $500-billion Sustainable & Decarbonization Finance Target and leads the TD Sustainable Bonds program, with several-hundred-million dollars aimed at projects that promote climate change mitigation and adaptation across North America – winning Environmental Finance’s Green Bond of the Year in 2024. But McEwen is quick to stress that collaboration is essential: “No one tackles sustainability alone, and it requires all disciplines.” It’s a philosophy he echoes with a quote from author Rachel Carson: “In nature, nothing exists alone.

THE SYSTEMS THINKER

Savannah Sarosiak-Larter

28, Toronto
Manager
Quinn & Partners

Drawn to problem-solving from an early age, Savannah Sarosiak-Larter went into engineering at the University of Toronto to tackle the biggest challenge of our time: decarbonizing the economy. “By influencing companies and investors to pursue low-carbon strategies, we can achieve outcomes that create a positive impact on a national and global level,” she says. At just 28, the rising leader is doing just that for clients of Quinn & Partners, one of Canada’s fastest-growing sustainability firms, getting 13,000 buildings to track their emissions and curb an estimated 100,000-plus tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and developing strategies for building out 100,000 electric-vehicle charging stations. “The accomplishment I’m most proud of is building the investment criteria to evaluate positive climate and social impacts for the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund” – a public fund set up to accelerate the deployment of carbon-curbing technology. Her advice for up-and-comers: “Adopt a systems-thinking approach to address global sustainability challenges to determine which solutions will alleviate systemic inequities rather than exacerbate them.”

THE CARBON HUNTERS

THE CARBON FOOTPRINT TRACKER

Ben Grande

28, Calgary
Co-founder & chief technology officer
Arbor

Ben Grande’s dad encouraged him to find a mission that allowed him to meet three goals: enjoy what you do, make money and make a difference. He hit the nail on the head with Arbor, a successful global platform that calculates the carbon impact of products, assets and supply chains. “Companies often set reduction targets with no clear direction on how to hit them,” Grande says. As chief technology officer for Arbor, he set out to rectify that, knowing that “most of the ‘sustainability’ data out there was flawed. We knew that we had to be diligent in our pursuit of accurate data and sensible methodology.” To date, Arbor has helped hundreds of businesses – from small “mom and pop shops” to large global companies such as Crocs – identify opportunities to avoid up to 373,000 tonnes of emissions, and Grande has no plans to slow down. “I have a goal to help every willing business measure and communicate the environmental impact of everything they buy, make or sell.”

THE CARBON-CAPTURE CRUSADER

Isabelle Callaghan

26, Toronto
Project manager
Deep Sky Labs

Isabelle Callaghan attended her first climate rally when she was 10 years old, hoisting up a handmade sign of a burning earth. Decades later, she has a key role in the world’s first carbon-removal-technology validation centre. As a project manager at Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon-removal developer, Callaghan is coordinating Deep Sky Labs, a $50-million, 217,000-square-foot facility in Innisfail, Alberta, that is about to break ground. She combed through 50 potential sites across two provinces, conducting assessments, site visits and negotiations. Once operational, the plant will remove 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Prior to Deep Sky, Callaghan was a senior business analyst at McKinsey & Company, working with Fortune 500 companies such as energy utilities and mining companies on sustainability and decarbonization. “In five years, I want to look back and say I played a key role in bringing one of today’s many solutions to life,” she says. “My focus is on scale. We have the solutions; now it’s time to execute.”

THE RETROFIT CHAMPION

Fellipe Falluh

28, Montreal
Founder/president
Retrofit Construction

Buildings account for roughly 18% of Canada’s emissions. While a lot of political attention and legislation focuses on curbing the carbon footprint of new construction, Fellipe Falluh believes the big challenge lies within the built environment we already have around us. That’s why, at the age of 24, the civil and environmental engineer founded Retrofit Construction, a company that tackles retrofits of older buildings to make them more energy efficient. “By doing so, we also make these buildings more resilient, comfortable, healthy and more valuable,” he says. Falluh comes from a family of builders in Brazil and says that the importance of sustainability and the environment was always emphasized as he grew up. The vice-president of Quebec’s passive-building association, and recent recipient of a King Charles III coronation medal, he transformed his own 130-year-old duplex in Montreal into the first certified net-zero-ready building in the province and is now sharing his knowledge in a podcast on high-performance construction and buildings.

THE BUILDING DECARBONIZER

Vit Vimal

28, Toronto
CEO & co-founder
Tuuli

Vit Vimal was studying architecture when he noticed a gap in the curriculum: “There was little emphasis on how our designs would impact the environment.” As a young architect, Vimal was tired of working on the sidelines of the climate change battle, consulting on how to make buildings prettier rather than greener. “I couldn’t accept the direction the building industry was heading, so I made the bold decision to leave my job and step onto the front lines of this fight.” He left to start Tuuli, a firm dedicated to sustainable architecture through software that helps developers measure, reduce and monitor the carbon emissions of their assets. “The fight against climate change starts with how we build,” he says, emphasizing that the Paris Agreement targets can’t be met without rethinking architecture, since buildings are responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions. “I will never stop pushing to make it a reality.”

YOUTH MOTIVATORS

THE GALVANIZER

Aubrey-Anne Laliberte-Pewapisconias

25, Saskatoon, SK
Director of DEI, Leading Change Canada; program manager
ImaGENation

“‘Always remember where you came from.’ My parents always tell me this before walking into new spaces to remind me to stay rooted in my teachings. It allows me to stay grounded in an approach to life and sustainability work that leads with Indigenous values and decolonization in mind,” says Aubrey-Anne Laliberte-Pewapisconias, who is a nêhiyâskwew from Canoe Lake Cree First Nation on Treaty 10 Territory and Little Pine First Nation on Treaty 6 Territory. That means incorporating interconnectedness, stewardship and relationships with the land, water and other living relatives in all that she does. She puts those values into practice as the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Leading Change Canada and as ImaGENation program manager at Indigenous Clean Energy, where she works with Indigenous youth who are spearheading clean energy projects across Canada. Recently, she helped install an electric vehicle charger on Flying Dust First Nation in Saskatchewan. Laliberte-Pewapisconias also served as Canada’s 2023 Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction negotiator at the G20 YouthSummit.

THE SOLUTIONS COACH

Cameron Toy Kluger

20, Montreal & NYC
Founder, Student Education for Environmental Development (SEED)

Growing up in Brooklyn, Cameron Toy Kluger’s connection to nature was mostly limited to squirrels and pigeons. He began developing a deeper appreciation of conservation through his first job, working as a guide in the Prospect Park Zoo. “I’ve pushed myself to explore how cities and nature can work together to strengthen our communities and build a resilient future,” he says. In 2022, Kluger founded Student Education for Environmental Development, or SEED, an initiative that brings free environmental education to schools, with a focus on underprivileged students in Canada and the United States, using a “hopeful, solution-oriented perspective” to inspire a younger generation. He also serves as a member of the Sustainability Projects Fund at McGill University, where he’s an environmental sciences undergrad, and oversees the distribution of $1 million annually to campus environmental projects.

THE YOUTH ENABLER

Gareth Gransaull

26, Toronto
Co-executive director
re•generation

“Every job should be a climate job, and all employees have a role to play.” That’s one of the key messages behind re-generation, a youth-empowering digital platform co-created by Gareth Gransaull, who has been motivated to tackle climate change since the tender age of nine. He charts his young awakening to the trailblazing Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and the ambivalent reaction he received from a neighbour about it. “I have since spent the rest of my life trying to get adults to change,” he says. That motivation spurred him to co-create re•generation, which connects young people with clean-economy jobs and provides a tool kit for employees to nudge their employers to be more climate-conscious. Gransaull has helped raise more than $1.5 million for their work. “We exist to help the next generation of leaders to develop critical-systems-thinking abilities, particularly by raising awareness about problems of inequality, shareholder primacy, neocolonialism and the structural barriers that exist which prevent the emergence of a more equitable economy,” he says.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER

Justin Langan

25, Winnipeg, MB
Founder and executive director
O’Kanata

Back in Swan River, a rural community in northern Manitoba, Justin Langan was taught by his father and elders about the connection between the land and his people. Starting as an 11-year-old working at his community’s Friendship Centre, he has been involved in various projects promoting Métis political and community engagement. The 2SLGBTQIA+ youth has taken that vision forward, creating O’Kanata in 2023 to support Indigenous youth. His goal is to bridge the gap between traditional ecological Indigenous knowledge and modern sustainability practices. “By empowering Indigenous youth through education and sustainable economic opportunities, I aim to create a future where our communities thrive both culturally and economically,” he says. O’Kanata has provided educational opportunities to more than 1,000 Indigenous youth and led to the reduction of 2.7 tons of carbon emissions in Manitoba.

NATURE TRAILBLAZERS

THE QUEEN OF INCLUSIVE GREEN SPACES

Kiana Bonnick

29, Whitby, ON
Climate change and community engagement specialist, Womxn of Colour Durham Collective

As a child exploring her Jamaican grandfather’s garden, Kiana Bonnick was captivated by the love he poured into nurturing his plants. For the last five years, she’s poured her own love of nature into the Womxn of Colour Durham Collective, promoting access to green spaces for racialized women through programs she has spearheaded like Get Outdoors, We Outside and Reclaiming Our Roots. “Understanding the technical and scientific aspects of climate change and the environment is important, but it tells us one part of the story,” Bonnick says. “Social aspects of climate change and different forms of knowledge are equally essential in this story.” Her community-building approach has also been reducing “eco-anxiety,” all while challenging the barriers faced by racialized individuals in outdoor spaces. She’s also been busy training the next generation of climate leaders, educating eight- to 16-year-olds to take the reins as part of the Lead Like a Girl program at DYLOTT (Developing Young Leaders of Tomorrow, Today).

THE CONSERVATION HAWK

Calder Schweitzer

27, Gananoque, ON
Executive director
Thousand Islands Watershed Land Trust

Calder Schweitzer’s passion for the territory stewarded by the Thousand Islands Watershed Land Trust is palpable. The trust is located within one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. “This means that you find species here living next to one another that don’t co-occur anywhere else in Canada,” Schweitzer says. His passion supercharged his rise through the ranks, moving from field biologist at the land trust in 2019 to executive director five years later. The trust protects and manages land donated by private owners for the purpose of conservation. Schweitzer has led the protection of 850 acres of conservation land, preserving ecosystems that prevent floods and droughts while safeguarding vital habitat for biodiversity and carbon sequestration. “Fighting for conservation can often feel like an uphill battle,” he says. “My advice is to stay balanced and maintain your passion in the face of this adversity.”

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It has been a long and obstacle-ridden road for Juliana v. United States, a case that argues that the government’s actions that cause climate change have violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.   

“This is no ordinary lawsuit,” Judge Ann Aiken, the Oregon District Court judge who has presided over much of the legal drama, declared back in 2016, when she first paved the way for the lawsuit to proceed to trial. In that ruling, Aiken denied a motion by the administration of President Barack Obama to have the case dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. The case was groundbreaking because it was the first to frame a climate case around constitutional rights. And it would have been the first time that fossil fuel policy confronted climate science in the courts in the U.S. But that trial never happened, and instead it has been years of the Obama, Trump and most recently Biden administrations trying to delay, halt or vanquish the lawsuit altogether. It is no wonder, as the youth originally went for the climate jugular, so to speak, demanding that the court order the government to “swiftly phase-down CO2 emissions aimed at atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are no more than 350 [parts per million] by 2100, develop a national plan to restore Earth’s energy balance, and implement that national plan so as to stabilize the climate system.” They later pared down their demands in response to a court ruling.   

The case appeared to have crossed its last hurdle in December, as Judge Aiken declared – again – that the youth could proceed to a trial. And then a new barrage of opposing motions emanated from the Department of Justice, under President Joe Biden, including an unprecedented seventh petition (following six by the Trump administration) for “writ of mandamus,” a rare legal tool that would shut down the case before evidence is heard. In May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the petition.   

But if the government is relentless, so too are the youth. In September, they filed a motion at the Supreme Court, asking it to “reverse an egregious error” by the Ninth Circuit Court that “flagrantly disregarded” the limits Congress and the Supreme Court placed on its jurisdiction. “This case is about addressing the climate crisis and protecting our fundamental rights like our right to life and freedom,” said 18-year-old Avery, one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a statement. “However, it is also about ensuring access to justice.”  

Juliana v. United States is one of a number of youth-driven climate cases that have experienced varying degrees of success in the U.S. and abroad. Last year, a Montana judge ruled that the state of Montana violated the constitutional rights of 16 young plaintiffs to a clean and healthful environment through legislation, enacted in 2011, that limits the environmental factors that can be considered when approving oil and gas projects. The court declared that legislation unconstitutional and ordered that Montana consider climate change and the emission of greenhouse gases when approving fossil fuel projects. An appeal of that decision was heard in July, and a decision is pending.   

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In Canada, a decision is still pending on Mathur v. Ontario, the first Charter-based climate case to reach a trial in this country. A court dismissed the case in 2023, but the seven youth who brought the arguments forward appealed that decision in January and are awaiting a ruling. Another Canadian youth climate case involving 14 children and teens from seven provinces and one territory will be proceeding to trial, expected to take place in 2025.   

Lawyers for the Juliana case note that it has inspired other cases, like one in South Korea, where the Constitutional Court this year declared a provision of the country’s climate law unconstitutional, a milestone in climate litigation in Asia.   

“This declaration of youths’ rights and the government’s wrongs is a testament to the leadership of youth plaintiffs and their relentless advocacy for a safe and livable future, and of another judiciary doing its job,” said Julia Olson, co-executive director and chief legal counsel with Our Children’s Trust, a U.S. non-profit behind the Juliana case. “We hope it serves as a clarion call for U.S. courts to follow suit.”  

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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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“The oceans are rising and so are we,” chanted a chorus of climate strikers marching through Manhattan.  

On the same day that Pakistan’s prime minister was pleading with world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly not to leave his country “alone high and dry” to cope with the catastrophic impacts of flooding, outside, thousands of young people were marching to Wall Street demanding climate reparations for poor countries.

With the latest round of global climate strikes planned in roughly 450 countries in late September (including nearly 40 in Canada and 134 in the United States) members of Generation Z and millennials were once again gathering in the streets to make their voices heard.  

Placards and microphones weren’t the only tools they used.  

Ten days earlier, seven Ontario youth appeared in court virtually to challenge the provincial government’s decision to gut its climate targets in 2018.

“We are here today to address the dire situation we find ourselves in [so we can] tell our children that we did all we could, while we could, to change our trajectory,” said co-plaintiff Shaelyn Wabegijig of the Rama First Nation at a press conference ahead of the hearing.  

They’re in good company. Whether they’re legal advocates, entrepreneurs, activists, engineers-in-training or policy geeks, Corporate Knights’ 2022 Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders are using their collective skills to challenge the status quo and bend the arc of history toward a more just and sustainable future.  

Earlier this year, 29-year-old Anishinaabe lawyer Stephanie Willsey helped First Nations communities win an $8-billion class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government to address the ongoing water crisis on reserves. Sanch Gupta and Milton Calderon Donefer have saved 52,000 pounds of food from going to waste and delivered more than 70,000 meals to homeless shelters in eight cities. At 28, Kurtis Layden, senior policy advisor in the Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, has been a key advisor on the federal ban on some single-use plastics, taking effect in 2025.

More than half the world’s population is now under 30 years old. The largest youth generation in history is coming of age while inheriting a planet marred by extreme climate events, a lingering pandemic, armed conflicts and sharply rising inflation. For its 11th annual youth survey, Deloitte surveyed 4,808 Gen Zers and 8,412 millennials across 46 countries and found that they’re “deeply worried” about the state of the world, but Gen Zers and millennials are putting in the work to drive change.  

They’re pressuring their employers, their schools (including MBA programs) and the businesses they support to take environmental action more seriously. (Only 15% of Gen Zers and 14% of millennials strongly agree that businesses are taking substantive actions to address the climate emergency, according to Deloitte.) The two generations marked by rising climate anxiety are also advocating for stronger support for workplace mental health.

For this year’s cohort of Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders, saving the world while safeguarding their own mental health has become critical to making sure their own leadership is sustainable for the long haul. That’s also central to their advice for up-and-coming sustainability leaders.

“I have seen far too many people in the field, including myself, burn out,” says Kait Tyschenko, founder of the Queer Infrastructure Network. They encourage youth in the sustainability space to “listen to their minds and bodies and to take care of themselves.”

Helen Watts, senior director of global partnerships at Student Energy, knows what it’s like to run on fumes while growing an organization to have a million-dollar budget. “We physically, mentally and spiritually cannot sustain this version of ourselves without committing to rest and recovery, taking time to stay connected to our communities and our motivators.”  

One thing the Top 30 Under 30 have in common is that they’re channelling their energies (including climate anxieties) into inspiring, needle-moving solutions, whether that’s fighting for Indigenous rights, building greener buildings and cleaner power, closing the loop on waste, or boosting corporate and government sustainability. Ultimately, they’re standing up for the well-being of all life on this planet – and they’re showing us all how it’s done.

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 shortlist of 60, then our panel of judges each submitted their top 30 picks, and we tallied the votes.

Judges

Tabatha Bull | President of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business  

Shilpa Tiwari | Founder of Her Climb and global executive vice-president of social impact and sustainability at Citizen Relations  

Phil De Luna | Sustainability expert at McKinsey, mentor at Creative Destruction Lab, and a 2021 Corporate Knights Top 30 Under 30

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 2023 to nominate any change agents under 30 that you think should be considered for next year’s list.

Stephanie Willsey

29, Toronto/Rama First Nation
Lawyer, McCarthy Tétrault LLP

Roughly 60 Indigenous communities in Canada don’t have access to clean water. But thanks to Stephanie Willsey, a proud Anishinaabe lawyer and active member of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, three First Nations received a historic $8-billion settlement agreement earlier this year to rectify their water crises. “To our people, water is life. Water is more than a basic resource. It is a medicine. It is part of ceremony,” says Willsey. She mentors other Indigenous lawyers and law students, as well as Indigenous high school students, so they too can see themselves in the profession. Willsey also provides legal advice at Pro Bono Students Canada’s Indigenous Human Rights Clinics and is a delegate at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Recently named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, Willsey says, “My goal has always been to use my law degree to help people, and I am so proud to be doing just that.”

Kat Cadungog

27, Calgary
executive director, The Youth Harbour

As an Albertan with friends and family tied to the oil and gas industry, Kate Cadungog feels like she has an “inside scoop” on how to create a more inclusive climate-resilient society. “I’ve always been inspired by narratives that bring people along and unite people, and I owe a lot of my perseverance to the Albertan ‘grit’ that I’ve learned from my peers,” she says. Armed with that experience, Cadungog wants to completely reimagine philanthropic systems and the way we support young climate mobilizers. Under Cadungog’s leadership, The Youth Harbour has raised $1.5 million to support youth-led climate action projects. In just its first year, the group has supported 15 such projects and committed $205,500 in funding to them. “I’m most proud of being able to raise the funds to regrant to youth-led climate movements across what’s currently referred to as Canada and actually getting it to the hands of youth,” she says.

Katie Wheatley

29, Montreal
Head of Canada, UN Principles for Responsible Investment

Incremental progress is Katie Wheatley’s priority. She looks at what she can accomplish in the next week or month as opposed to the next few years. And that’s probably a healthy perspective given that her work focuses on helping pension funds, universities and other institutional investors become responsible investors – a task with challenges that are systemic and long-term. But that doesn’t mean that Wheatley’s work doesn’t have a massive impact. “Changing the way that our financial system works to foster greater transparency and address social and environmental externalities is critical to improving collective well-being in the long-term, and institutional investors can play a significant part in that, given their size and worth,” she says. Her work has included helping Indigenous trusts and investors with aggregate assets of more than $480 million under management to harness their capital for collective good.

Catherine Marot

26, Toronto
CEO, CASE

There’s a story Catherine Marot heard growing up about a man trying to save starfish that had washed up onshore by throwing what he could back into the sea. “A boy comes up to him and asks him why he is bothering, because he’ll never save them all,” she recounts. The man simply bends down, tosses another into the sea and says, “I made a difference to that one.” “This story inspired me on a personal level to take action where I can.” Marot started a solo project saving one takeout container at a time. The daughter of waste-conscious immigrants from South Africa and Zimbabwe eventually started getcase.ca, preventing more than 250,000 black takeout containers from ending up in landfill by sanitizing them and selling them back to restaurants. This also amounts to an approximate savings of 34,644 kilowatt-hours of energy, 97.8 barrels of virgin fossil fuels and 180 cubic yards of landfill space. “Ultimately, I hope to inspire others [so] that we can change the status quo.”

Kurtis Layden

28, Ottawa
senior policy advisor, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change

Kurtis Layden was just 15 when he was part of the Canadian delegation to a UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network climate change conference in Denmark. The experience cemented a firm belief in Layden that Canada needed to take a leading role on the international stage when it came to tackling the climate crisis. Since then, he has worked in the offices of three successive environment ministers and has been a key advisor on some of the Liberal government’s main environmental policies, including its ban on some single-use plastics. Once the ban takes effect in 2025, it could eliminate an estimated 1.3 million tonnes of plastic waste over the following decade. “These policies are critical to addressing environmental challenges such as pollution and climate change in Canada at a national scale and to help promote environmental sustainability,” he says.

Pratap Sandhu

27, Vancouver
CEO & director, Pangea Natural Foods

By the age of 21, Pratap Sandhu was already marketing director at his family’s global food company. After he got his MBA from the University of Liverpool, Sandhu decided to branch out on his own, founding Pangea Natural Foods in the spring of 2021. With $1.4 million in seed financing, Sandhu shopped his flagship product, Pangea Plant-Based Patties, to grocers across North America. “I was inspired to create high-quality nutritious products while keeping a clean label,” says Sandhu. Just over one year later, Pangea products are now in more than 300 stores, including select Loblaw and IGA stores. Sandhu’s latest product? Vancouver-made vegan Chikken Nuggets made with three types of pea protein. “We are excited to launch another plant-based product given the immense growth that the sector is experiencing.”

Ethan Talbot Schwartz

27, Toronto/Montreal
consultant, CPCS Transcom

As an associate with JCM Power, Ethan Talbot Schwartz led the development of renewable energy projects in Malawi, the world’s fifth-poorest country. With a background in engineering and diplomacy, honed through a master’s in international relations and a stint at the UN, Schwartz worked for months in the East African nation to advance the development of its first utility-scale wind farm. The project should mitigate more than 175,000 tonnes of CO2 per year while increasing the country’s installed generation capacity by nearly 10%. “A key takeaway from my travels was that I needed to use [the] advantage … of simply being born in a place like Canada as best as I could to make the world a better place.” Schwartz recently started as a consultant with CPCS, where he supports the organization in providing sustainable infrastructure solutions to governments across sub-Saharan Africa. With Pathways to Education, he provides weekly tutoring services to students in math and science while leading lectures on climate change to fill a gap in the current Ontario curriculum. Says Schwartz, “They will be the ones making a difference in tomorrow’s society!”

Samia Sami

24, Regina
engineer-in-training, SaskPower

“In Islam, humans are referred to as ‘khalifa’ (guardians) of the earth,” says Samia Sami. Those teachings have helped shape Sami’s attitude toward her two passions, sustainability and engineering. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, she now designs transmission stations to support the increased use of renewable energy (contributing to Saskatchewan’s goal of generating 50% electricity from renewables by 2030). “I have learned that electrical engineers can make a difference in the ecological footprint of the world.” As well, her work at the University of Saskatchewan reduced the school’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20% from 2007 levels, and she has helped 12 Canadian mosques implement sustainability initiatives via the Greening Canadian Mosques program. The Starfish board member is also big on empowering youth. As a chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society student branch chapter, Sami helps students advance their careers in sustainable energy. “It is also important for youth to realize that diversity plays a vital role in our fight against climate change.”

Andy Lam

29, Toronto
manager of climate programs, MaRS Discovery District

When Andy Lam is working late and his friends pressure him to get off early, he has an answer at the ready: “Climate change isn’t going to solve itself.” During his last five years at MaRS Discovery District, Lam has been busy helping Canada’s cleantech entrepreneurs grow their businesses and scale their solutions. “Seeing these innovators take risks and put their careers on the line to make the world a better place also inspired me to join the fight,” he says. That fight? Managing Mission from MaRS: Climate Impact Challenge, which helps 10 Canadian climate tech companies with high potential overcome barriers to adoption. Lam has advice for budding sustainability leaders: “Be solution-oriented rather than problem-oriented. We all know that climate change is a big issue, that pollution is a big issue, but we need to start focusing on how we’ll resolve them and begin actioning.”

Leah Perry

29, Burlington, ON
senior manager, cleantech, venture services, MaRS Discovery District

With less than 20% of Canadian cleantech companies having a female founder, Leah Perry wants to create not only a more sustainable world but one that is also led by a diverse mix of leaders. “It has been amazing to work alongside these amazing women founders to help accelerate their technology to the market,” says Perry, who leads the Women in Cleantech Accelerator at MaRS Discovery District. Raised by two environmentalists, she’s dedicated to ensuring women have equal opportunity to succeed in our net-zero future. The Schulich School of Business grad has been actively involved in the cleantech capital ecosystem since 2015, beginning as a founding member of the cleantech team at Export Development Canada and now as manager of cleantech venture services at MaRS. “There are more jobs in sustainability and impact than there ever have been,” says Perry. “A better world doesn’t just have to be a side hustle. Find a job that embodies your beliefs and you can spend every day chasing your mission.”

Marco Folino

27, Vancouver
manager of sustainable investing, BentallGreenOak

When Marco Folino started working as a management consultant, he found that there were rarely enough sustainability experts to help companies considering integrating ESG into their strategic goals. That’s when he decided to pursue a career in sustainability. Folino now manages sustainability programs for property management firm BentallGreenOak, which has US$80 billion in assets under management. Through this work, Folino has helped deliver custom ESG action plans for more than 120 million square feet of real estate properties across North America. He’s also provided climate adaptation plans for more than 90 million square feet of properties. Last year, Folino’s firm made a commitment to make its operations and assets under management net-zero by 2050 or earlier – a challenge he’s embracing with open arms. “Real accomplishments come when you have a relentless drive to succeed despite many failed attempts. This often means turning over every stone until you find the one that has what you’re looking for,” he says. 

Kait Tyschenko

27, Toronto/London
founder, Queer Infrastructure Network

Kait Tyschenko began their career in the environmental non-profit realm and was soon drawn to the construction sector’s low-carbon potential. Working at two of Canada’s largest construction companies, Pomerleau and EllisDon, Tyschenko focused on scaling up sustainability- and equity-driven innovations. These included community engagement programs, an Indigenous-relations roadmap, a sustainable-construction training program, and R&D exploring the powers of life-cycle assessment to reduce the embodied carbon of building projects. “I work tirelessly to ensure that the sustainability and impact projects that I lead have an equity-informed and -integrated lens,” they say. Tyschenko is the founder of the Queer Infrastructure Network, a group working to improve LGBTQ2S+ inclusion, visibility and safety in the Canadian infrastructure sector. “We cannot do the work we need to do without being kind and understanding with one another,” says Tyschenko, who is queer and trans-nonbinary. 

Alex Cool-Fergus

29, Gatineau, QC
outreach & engagement advisor, Federation of Canadian Municipalities

Alex Cool-Fergus calls herself “a municipal nerd innovating to build a more sustainable world.” Having witnessed her neighbours and parents win a campaign to protect local greenspace when she was a child, she got interested in both movement-building and sustainability. “Municipalities are the most ambitious level of government for climate mitigation and adaptation yet have the fewest resources to achieve their goals,” says Cool-Fergus, who has spent most of her career working with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ climate programs, including the Global Covenant of Mayors and the Green Municipal Fund. From cofounding a bike co-op at the University of Sherbrooke to helping 10 municipal candidates in Gatineau get elected with ambitious climate platforms, Cool-Fergus has stayed focused on creating a resilient and inclusive world. “As a young woman of colour, I quickly understood that it is essential to apply an equity and reconciliation lens to all sustainability policies.” The avid cyclist also sits on the board of the CREDDO, the largest environmental non-profit in the Outaouais region.

Helen Watts

28, Toronto
senior director of global partnerships, Student Energy

Right out of her undergraduate degree, Helen Watts became the head of fundraising for what would become the world’s largest organization working with young people on the energy transition. Over the next five years she drove the expansion of Student Energy’s global partnerships, growing the youth-led organization’s budget by 680% to help turn it into a multimillion-dollar organization and managing a team that supports a network of 44 funding and strategic partners. “I don’t come from a typical energy or climate background,” says the history major, who is frank about experiencing imposter syndrome when she started in this field. “I’m really passionate now about bridging the gap for young people who don’t feel they have the knowledge or experience to participate in climate and clean energy.” In 2018, Watts co-founded an accelerator for young people in low-income, high-climate-risk countries working on climate start-ups. Now, she’s focused on raising accessible funding for youth-led clean energy projects through the Student Energy Solutions Movement in partnership with the UN. “We need everyone at the table and in this fight with unique solutions to get where we need to be on the energy transition,” she says.

Mark Soberman

29, Vienna, Austria
director of research & development, Evanesce

Mark Soberman says he’s always been sensitive to the impact of human activity on the natural world. So it’s fitting that he is now working on the cutting-edge of sustainable packaging at Evanesce Packaging Solutions, a compostable packaging company based in Vancouver. (He’s currently conducting R&D at a partner lab in Vienna.) In the hope of helping to rid the world of single-use plastics, he is leading the development of Evanesce’s proprietary plant-based packaging material that biodegrades in up to 90 days. And if all goes to plan, he sees the company’s products – which are made of starch, cellulose fibre and agricultural byproducts – diverting thousands of tonnes of waste from landfill to industrial composting, where it can be used to grow plants and take more CO2 out of the air. “I firmly believe in waste reduction and working on leaving the world a better place than I found it,” he says.

Nabeela Merchant

29, Hamilton, ON
founder, Canadian Women in Venture Capital; senior associate, TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good

Nabeela Merchant knows well that every individual action – no matter how small – contributes to collective action. “Big things can grow out of small, consistent steps. That’s the power of compounded action,” she says. What started as a casual dinner she organized in 2018 has grown into Canadian Women in Venture Capital – a national group that looks to empower and connect women in the industry. Through this work, Merchant has contributed to helping more than 350 women get the support they need to succeed in an industry that has been dominated by men. While she was the initial igniter of the community, she is quick to give credit to the larger collective of women who have made it thrive. She began her career in investing five years ago and, as an early-stage investor at the $100-million TELUS Pollinator Fund, has focused on investments that look to tackle the climate crisis, inequality and barriers to healthcare.

Theresa Westhaver

29, Treaty 6 and 8 in the traditional territory of the Secwépemc Nehiyaw, Stoney, Métis, Dene-zaa, and Aseniwuche Winewak (now known as Jasper National Park)
Indigenous liaison, Jasper National Park, & co-founder, Howl Experience

Theresa Westhaver’s parents taught her that we’re all visitors to the animals’ homeland. Her father was a park warden and her mother a park interpreter. She has followed in their footsteps, as she now works as an Indigenous liaison for Parks Canada and teaches other young people about conservation through an educational non-profit called Howl Experience. “Without personal connection to place, people will not be inspired to protect and care for it. This guides the work that I do,” she says. As if that wasn’t enough to keep the single mom busy, she also runs a small business, called Mountain Stek’lep (formerly Left Coast Collective), which sells upcycled beadwork. She hopes that the impact of her work “ripples down to the next seven generations. If at least one youth is empowered to learn opportunities and leadership roles that they may not have otherwise seen themselves in, I would see that as being meaningful change.”

Shivani Chotalia

29, Toronto/Edmonton
director of development & partnerships, NRStor

Growing up in Edmonton, sandwiched between the oil industry and the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, Shivani Chotalia felt a growing sense of responsibility for building the world she wanted to see. “It became clear to me that the way we manage our economy needs to be aligned with stewarding the natural ecosystems that support us all.” As a director at one of Canada’s leading energy-storage project developers, NRStor, she’s particularly proud of contributing to its “partnerships first” approach with First Nations communities. NRStor and Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation are launching one of the largest energy-storage facilities in North America. “We can use our projects as an avenue to enable greater Indigenous ownership and economic benefits resulting from our transition to clean energy.” The engineer and financial professional, with a background in international development, also mentors Indigenous youth with Outside Looking In and in 2020 became the youngest board member of Environmental Defence.

Theresa Dearden

28, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea/Salt Spring Island, B.C.
technical lead, Natural Resource Management Hub, UNDP Papua New Guinea

It’s hard enough for most people to fully grasp the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Papua New Guinea, a nation where more than 800 languages are spoken. Theresa Dearden helps communities in the country transcend cultural barriers to improve sustainable development. The first-generation Canadian (with parents from Thailand and the U.K.) designs user-friendly, open-source digital tools, including a phone app called Lukim Gather, that allow communities to monitor and report social or environmental issues (such as deforestation or pollution) to policy-makers. “We need good data in order to be able to avoid devastating climate change [and] biodiversity loss,” she says. She hopes to spread the idea that you don’t need to be a tech guru or biologist to collect data that can change the world. “Preservation of these ecosystems is vital for mitigating climate change at a global level.”

Jonathan Edwards

29, Aurora, ON
principal research scientist, CERT Systems

Jonathan Edwards was drawn to sustainability work after learning about climate change in high school. He realized how crucial cleantech was to the future of the world and decided to devote his career to it. His work at start-up CERT Systems focuses on converting carbon dioxide into fuels and chemical feedstocks using only water and electricity. Edwards says that while the climate crisis can be daunting, the world needs to see a huge scale-up of cleantech to meet its 2050 emissions targets. “When you feel that you or your technology [are] very small compared to this global challenge, recognize that you are not alone and that you have a tremendous opportunity before you. Plan for growth, but don’t be afraid to take that first step,” he says. Over the next five years, Edwards and his team will further develop their technology for commercialization.

Anoosha Lalani

27, Toronto/Pakistan
manager of ESG reporting & assurance, KPMG

Born in Pakistan, then raised in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia before arriving in Canada for university, Anoosha Lalani has seen firsthand what happens when people cling to the idea that climate change affects only those far away. “I’m passionate about climate change because I believe equity does not exist without sustainability.” As ESG manager at KPMG, Lalani supports multibillion-dollar companies to develop operating models that actively work toward building a greener future. “What I like most about my job is that I can support organizations trying to make the shift from viewing ESG as simply a marketing exercise to embedding it within their strategy and ensuring effective disclosure.” As a passionate public speaker, novelist, Ocean Wise alumni ambassador and World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Lalani encourages youth to keep telling their climate stories and using their skills to move the needle. “Every inch counts!”

Pierre-Laurent Macridis

28, Montreal
Associate Principal, Asset Management, Fondaction

Pierre-Laurent Macridis tries to develop solutions that will tackle a problem in the most efficient way. And he hopes that the impact-investing management firm he helped launch this summer will play an important role in closing the US$2.5-trillion funding gap needed to achieve the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. His work has helped catalyze more than $500 million in impact investing, primarily targeted toward climate change. He’s also managed funds and financed businesses that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1.3 million tonnes. But most importantly, Macridis has mentored more than 20 young people pursuing careers in sustainability-related fields. To inspire his mentees, Macridis reminds them that Rome was not built in a day, nor alone: “Don’t be afraid to dream big and find your peers with whom you can shoot for the moon, because even if you miss it, you’ll land amongst the stars.”

Jasveen Brar

27, Calgary
executive director, Youth Climate Lab

Jasveen Brar was on a university research trip in Antarctica years ago when she saw something that changed her life: a plastic water bottle left between two penguin rookeries in the otherwise pristine landscape. “To see something of our man-made creation at the ends of [the] earth was shocking. I knew that we needed to do more [and] I needed to do more to leave our planet in a better place,” she says. After she returned from her trip, she changed her degree to pursue sustainability. Last year, the former Ocean Wise manager became the executive director of Youth Climate Lab, a non-profit that has raised more than US$450,000 to support youth-led climate action. The lab gives youth the skills, financial access and policy knowledge to become climate leaders. As she becomes an “older youth,” Brar hopes she’ll be able to “leave this space in a better place for future youth and to pave a better, more just and resilient future together.”

Erin Andrews

27, Toronto
executive director, Impact Zero

Erin Andrews’s best advice for tomorrow’s youth sustainability leaders is to find a community of people who inspire you. She founded Impact Zero to do just that. The Toronto-based organization brings businesses, consumers and entrepreneurs together with the goal of creating a circular economy. But Andrews says that no single organization on its own will make the circular economy a reality. “The only option is empowerment, real collaboration and resource-sharing,” she says. Andrews built the organization from scratch, working tirelessly to bring more attention to the idea of a circular economy in Toronto. She says that the circular economy can provide huge emission-reduction opportunities and that we just need to empower people to bring these solutions to life. Since 2020, Impact Zero has informed thousands of people about circularity and connected them with circular businesses through a directory it created. The group has also helped launch seven circular start-ups.

Eric Lam

26, Gatineau, QC
economic advisor on energy transition and finance, Environment and Climate Change Canada

Between 2019 and 2021, private banks and financial institutions invested US$1.5 trillion in coal. Eric Lam is trying to put a stop to that. He’s the private finance lead for Team Canada in the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a joint initiative between Canada and the U.K. that works to phase out global coal power generation. “There’s a lot of talk about greenwashing with all of these financial institutions pledging to meet net-zero by 2050 … I am working to get financial institutions to actually take action on their net-zero commitments.” He also advises public banks on greening their investments. He admits that working in sustainability can be demoralizing, especially when banks keep telling him “no.” Says Lam, “It’s important to remember that by working in this field, you are part of a movement that is doing as much as we can within the means that we have.”

Sabreen Salman

29, Toronto
director of ESG reporting & measurement, Export Development Canada

Sabreen Salman had always enjoyed math and was working toward a degree in business at Schulich, specializing in financial accounting, when she was introduced to the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since then, she’s risen in the ranks as a sustainability professional and ESG manager in the financial industry. She’s now director of ESG reporting and disclosures at Export Development Canada (EDC). ”ESG disclosures and reporting have come a long way from voluntary ‘CSR reporting’ to now being a business imperative expected by investors, shareholders and stakeholders.” Her work at EDC and in industry groups has helped create essential ESG standards. Over the next five years, Salman hopes to see ESG embedded in all areas of business, and she wants to play a part in helping companies reach that goal. “I want to play my role in this transition to help educate and empower teams sitting outside of ESG to really understand their ESG impacts and embed it in their work,” she says.

Devesh Bharadwaj

28, Victoria
CEO, Pani Energy

Water is more than just what comes out of a tap or what is needed to flush the toilet. It’s what we use to grow the food we eat, manufacture the products we use and produce the energy we consume. Growing up in India, Devesh Bharadwaj saw the critical role that water, and a lack of access to it, plays in the health and development of communities. “Every drop of that water and wastewater needs to be treated and fit for purpose, and that treatment takes its own toll on the environment.” After completing a mechanical engineering degree in Canada, he started building an industry-transforming software-as-service company called Pani Energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by water and wastewater treatment processes. “We’re aiming to cut down on 500 megatons of emissions per year from the sector by 2032.” So far, the company has raised more than $8 million working with worldwide partners from across the industry to get as many treatment plants as possible on board in this mission. The mantra that drives him: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” Adds Bharadwaj, “Find a problem that is meaningful, that excites you and is worth solving.”

Jamie Mark

28, Toronto
chief operating officer, Exactus Energy

Jamie Mark was one of the first employees hired by Exactus Energy after its
founding in 2016. Exactus was a small start-up back then, providing engineering
and design services for solar providers. “We started with a handful of employees in
a garage and our team size is now approaching 200.” At the beginning, the
engineering grad designed solar panel layouts herself. Now, as chief operating officer,
she leads six different teams across four countries, having helped build the firm
from the ground up into a leader in solar engineering and design in North America.
“Complacency is dangerous,” says Mark, who has had to constantly adapt and be
open to change in an industry known as the “solarcoaster.” “The status quo and our
comfortable routines are not going to cut it anymore. We need to question how both
our own day-to-day actions and how existing policy and systems are impacting our
planet and start making changes to combat these impacts.”

Sanch Gupta & Milton Calderon Donefer

Both 25, Toronto
co-founders, MealCare

When Sanch Gupta and Milton Calderon Donefer were students at McGill University, they often sat in a school cafeteria until closing, when they saw staff throw out trays of fresh meals. Around the same time, they talked to many unhoused people in downtown Montreal who needed food. They founded MealCare to tackle both issues. “Every day, MealCare makes a tangible impact both in reducing the environmental impact of food waste, as well as helping people in our communities not go hungry,” says Calderon Donefer. With chapters in eight cities, MealCare has already saved shelters more than $300,000 and delivered more than 70,000 meals to the hungry. “Growing up in Canada, it was shocking to me that one in seven people suffer from food insecurity, and I wanted to use my privileged position to help underserved members of my community,” says Gupta. “We believe food is essential and should be available to every human being, especially when we as a nation have an abundance of it.”

Shaelyn Wabegijig

25, Rama First Nation/Lekwungen Territory, Victoria
master’s student in Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria

Since Shaelyn Wabegijig was five years old, she wanted to change the world. “I have always questioned the way the world is,” she says. When she attended university, she connected with the local Anishinaabeg community and learned about teachings such as Ginawaydaganuk (all is related) and Mino Bimaadiziwin (to live the good life) that confirmed her feelings of responsibility to live in a way that respected the planet. The 25-year-old master’s student is now one of seven youths suing the Ontario government for lowering its emission-reductions targets in 2018. “I hope our court case sets a precedent, putting into law that governments have the obligation to protect citizens from climate change and that all people and future generations have the right to a safe and habitable environment.” Before she left to pursue her master’s, Wabegijig was a program and outreach coordinator at Kawartha World Issues Centre, where she worked to assert Indigenous-led conservation in Ontario and empower youth and Indigenous Peoples to steward their lands for future generations.

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Mitchell Beer: We’ve seen several climate justice cases in Canada rejected by the courts before they could be heard. Yours is the first one to advance to a hearing. What makes it different?

Thomson: This case is obviously historic. It’s the first climate lawsuit based on Charter-protected rights to reach a full hearing in any Canadian court. In 2020, when the Ontario Superior Court dismissed the province’s attempts to stop this case, it made a landmark ruling that fundamental rights protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms can be threatened by climate change, and citizens have the ability to challenge a Canadian government’s contributions to the climate crisis under the highest law of the land. So for the first time in Canadian legal history, a government’s climate record will be put on trial. That’s a pivotal moment in the fight for justice.

In the past, the Charter has been fundamental in securing rights to same-sex marriage, abortion, and numerous other rights. We know that the climate crisis will be one of the greatest threats of the 21st century, and our clients’ case is the first time a court will determine whether Charter-protected rights are violated by that threat.

MB: You’ve based the case on a single government action, rather than a broad policy. What difference do you see that making?

Thomson: Our position is that the Ontario government’s and Premier Doug Ford’s weakening of Ontario’s 2030 climate target violates the Charter rights to life, security of person, and equality. At a time when the science says we should be doing more, showing greater climate ambition, the government has thrown climate action in this province into reverse. Our case targets that specific action that puts our collective future at risk. Our case is based on numerous experts who have provided evidence setting out exactly what the impacts of the Ontario government’s target will be, and how the climate emergency will be experienced in Ontario. There is overwhelming evidence in this case that climate change is one of the most, if not the most, severe threat to our fundamental rights in this province in the 21st century.

MB: What makes this a Charter case?

Thomson: For more than 30 years, elected politicians have ignored the warnings on climate change. They’ve continued to worsen this crisis with little regard for our collective future and the that of future generations. It is now abundantly clear that climate change poses significant threats to our most fundamental rights, the very rights that the Charter is designed to protect.

The Charter is part of our constitution, which means it sets rules that all governments must follow. When governments engage in conduct that violates the Charter, it is the job of the courts to step in and safeguard citizens from these violations.

No Canadian court has ever looked at all the evidence and determined whether a government’s actions in furthering the climate crisis constitutes a violation of the Charter. That’s what makes my clients’ case so unique. For the first time, citizens are asking the courts to consider the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change and determine whether it constitutes a violation of Charter rights. Essentially, whether the government’s actions violate the very rules that govern the nation. If the Court agrees with my clients, and the overwhelming scientific evidence, it can step in and order the government to stop violating these rights.

MB: If a court ruled against you, what would it say about the value and impact of the Charter itself, and how would it affect Canadians’ confidence that the country is grounded in a shared understanding of rights and freedoms?

Thomson: The overwhelming evidence of the harms posed by climate change will be before a court. No lower court in Canada has ruled in favour of a case like this in the past, but the Charter is supposed to grow and adapt in response to these kinds of harms, particularly when there is unimpeded evidence that the nature of these harms will be severe, widespread, and existential. So we’re confident that our case has a good chance of succeeding, and we believe a victory would mean real progress in the fight for a safe future.

MB: When you say ‘unimpeded’, what does that mean?

Thomson: We’ve provided a number of affidavits in this court case. Some of those experts were questioned by the Ontario government, but their evidence that the climate crisis will cause widespread harms will be before the court. The response of the Ontario government has really been to downplay and in some cases deny the severity of the climate crisis and its own role in causing these devastating impacts.

MB: Alex Neufeldt and Shelby Gagnon, why did you each get involved with this case?

Neufeldt: Climate change is obviously an existential threat, and I don’t want to die an untimely death due to climate change or suffer any ill effects. And it would be nice to live in a place where the people in charge are leaders who are taking us in the right direction through the transition to green jobs, a green economy, a low-carbon economy. There’s potential to have a lot of impacts for people, not just in a climate sense, but in terms of more prosperity for everyone. The government of Ontario has taken us in the wrong direction, and I’d like to see them do better.

Gagnon: As an Indigenous woman, I’m looking at how to protect the land and the spirits and the other beings that live on this land and this Earth. I felt a pull to be a part of this case to speak and advocate for the things that can’t physically speak, to protect my community and the future generations that will be affected by climate change. I said yes to this case right away out of a responsibility to advocate for stricter policies within this system we live in, even though that system was never meant for me.

I work in food security, and in the three years since this case began, there’ve already been changes in harvesting times. Last year there were no blueberries, and we’re berry people, so for me and my community there’s a loss of identity when we see these foods, plants, and even animals being lost, just disappearing. It’s a scary thing, it creates a sense of urgency to be in this, and I’m happy that we’re going to a hearing now. I know it takes time and a lot of kicking to shift these colonial, racist policies, so I’m hoping we’ll see a change in the power the government has, and the power that people and communities have when we come together.

Neufeldt: Some of the practical examples are banal compared to species loss and loss of traditional foods, but they’re impacts that some people will resonate with. In Ottawa, which is unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin Anishnaabe territory, there’ve been a number of tornadoes and floods, and aside from being really scary, they’ve affected my dress rental business. People have cancelled appointments because the power was out and they had more important things to worry about. Or they’ve returned dresses late because they got completely flooded. I’m not going to pretend this is some earth-shattering thing, but I can see a future impact on any kind of business that sells non-essential goods and services that are the backbone of the economy. It’s only going to get worse as these extreme weather events get more severe and frequent.

MB: What does a win look like?

Neufeldt: A win would be a legal precedent that climate change falls within the scope of the Charter, and that governments have a legal responsibility to protect us from the impacts of climate change. But further than that, our case is about an emissions reduction target which was pretty decent before the Ford administration came to power and rolled it back to one that is completely inadequate. So if the judge said to throw out this target and replace it with something more ambitious, I’m not sure how likely that is, but it would be a powerful win.

Gagnon: The other win is the sense of how individuals and communities and even young people have the power to speak and have our voices heard through this colonial and racist legal system. Even for me, coming from Northern Ontario, there’s a way to speak my truth and advocate for something greater than just myself. It’s showing this communal power, that anybody could do this.

It really helps that we’re doing this together and supporting each other. We all have our journeys and paths we’ve been on that led us into this case; we’re all in our own realms or careers or life journeys. So there’s a win on the legal side, but also just a win for people.

MB: Is this the sound of hope in the face of the climate emergency?

Gagnon: There’s so much that hurts in this world, but as an Indigenous person in this colonial system I do see so many beautiful humans and beautiful spirits in my life. I do see this building up of hope and light with different people and communities. As Anishnaabe, there’s this teaching that you constantly seek—so I’d like to say that I’m an optimist. I need to have hope to do this work. So I balance doing this kind of scary work with what fulfills me, by giving energy to my community and doing what connects me with such a beautiful land.

Neufeldt: Being a part of this case has had a really positive impact on my life because action breeds hope. Inaction breeds despair. I find I have less climate anxiety now than I used to. The problem is getting worse, and yet I’ve felt more hope and more optimism [by doing something about it]. I hope our case inspires other young people around the world to step into their power.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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More than half the world’s population is under the age of 40, and yet this group is dramatically underrepresented in the decision-making bodies of corporations, governments and universities.

One exciting tool some companies are using to engage millennials and members of Gen Z in business decision-making is creating a shadow board composed of younger employees who review all decisions made by the board of directors or the executive committee.

Giving young people direct access to senior decision-makers can help an organization stay relevant in an increasingly digital world. Under the direction of CEO Marco Bizzarri and creative director Alessandro Michele, luxury fashion brand Gucci introduced a “shadow committee” of young Gucci employees in 2015, which helped them reinvent the 100-year-old fashion house into an ecologically conscious millennial favourite. Gucci experienced a 136% spike in sales by 2019. In comparison, the Harvard Business Review points out that sales of Prada, which did not have a shadow board, dropped 11.5% during the same period. Prada has since been playing catch-up.

French hotel company Accor, founded in 1967, set up its youth shadow board a few years ago to try to figure out how it could stay competitive with Airbnb. Using the shadow board’s advice, the multinational hospitality firm launched a millennial-focused hotel chain called Jo&Joe.

Transforming business schools

Dusty corporations aren’t the only ones that could benefit from the insights of the next generation of business leaders. McGill business school student Maxime Lakat and his colleagues have been campaigning for years to get more student representation on business schools’ governance committees to ensure that sustainability and the climate crisis are part of curricula.

“It’s not good enough to have a course on CSR [corporate social responsibility],” says Lakat, who is chair of the Canadian Business Youth Council for Sustainable Development. “Sustainability needs to be integrated into every department in business schools.”

Years of campaigning culminated in bringing together 65 youth-led organizations to create Our Future, Our Business, a manifesto for transforming Canadian business schools. One of the report’s recommendations is that business schools have at least 30% student representation on their governance committees.

Lakat and his colleagues have organized symposia, released reports and engaged supportive faculty and outside professional organizations – including Corporate Knights. Last year, Lakat was petitioning to have at least one youth seat on every corporate board. He addressed Corporate Knights’ annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens virtual gala, urging corporate leaders to do just that.

There hasn’t been much concrete progress when it comes to getting youth on corporate boards in Canada, but advocates say momentum is building toward this goal. Using the shadow board model, a youth-led organization called Student Energy is trying to facilitate youth advisory boards that help “to make forward-thinking recommendations on where companies need to go if they want to take meaningful action on climate, energy and equity,” says Meredith Adler, the executive director of Student Energy.

Many organizations have accelerated their digital transformation as a result of the pandemic and deepened their commitments to being socially and environmentally progressive. Engaging millennials and members of Gen Z in a meaningful way can help businesses – and business schools – stay culturally relevant and innovative in a rapidly evolving world.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, which focuses on disruptive innovation.

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“There is no Planet B. There is no Planet Blah. Blah, blah, blah.”

“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action,” said Thunberg, calling out three decades of climate lip service as a betrayal of present and future generations.

She’s not alone. A fall survey of 10,000 youth aged 16 to 25 in 10 countries found “widespread psychological distress” and feelings of betrayal over inadequate government response on climate.
Faith in business is plummeting, too. According to Deloitte’s annual global survey of millennials and members of Gen Z, the number of youth who believe business has a positive impact on society is down to 47% in 2021, from 76% in 2017.

“We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible,” said Thunberg.

Gen Z and millennials are done waiting. They’re channelling their anxiety over the state of the planet by holding those in power to account, redefining what’s possible and driving solutions.

On September 24, hundreds of thousands returned to the streets for global climate strikes in almost 100 countries for the first time since the pandemic began. A few days later, a sobering study published in Science underlined what’s at stake. A child born in 2020 will, on average, live through twice the number of wildfires and three times more droughts, floods and crop failures as people born 60 years ago.

Nonetheless, roughly half of young people polled by the Pew Research Center report feeling confident that we can reduce the effects of climate change. They’re doing more than any other generation to be part of the solution, whether they’re volunteering, attending rallies or contacting their elected officials. They’re also pursuing environment-related degrees and careers in record numbers.

And as this year’s 30 Under 30 list of sustainability leaders reveals, they’re pushing the corporations they work for to go greener, starting their own innovative companies and NGOs, and leading the change at every turn.

When Corporate Knights opened up this year’s 30 Under 30 nominations to the public in April, we received a record number of inspiring candidates. An internal team had a tough time narrowing the list of submissions down to a short list of 60. Then a panel of judges each submitted their top 30 picks and the votes were tallied.

The list is peppered with Indigenous leaders, renewable-energy champions, climate activists, cleantech innovators, social entrepreneurs, zero-waste advocates, researchers, engineers and more. Reading their stories will make you want to up your game and realize that, as Thunberg said, “Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.”

Want to be on next year’s 30 under 30? We know there are armies of young people blazing the way. Visit corporateknights.com in April 2022 to nominate any change agents under 30 that you think should be considered for next year’s list.

Judges

Tabatha Bull
President of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business

Jyoti Stephens
VP of mission and strategy for Nature’s Path

Catherine Abreu
Executive director of Climate Action Network

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

Rosalie LaBillois
24, Eel River 3, NB, co-chair,
Assembly of First Nations National Youth Council

From a family of Mi’kmaq fishermen who live on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Rosalie LaBillois was born and raised between her two communities of Listuguj, in Quebec, and Eel River Bar First Nation, in New Brunswick. “I was raised by parents and a family who committed to breaking cycles and healing intergenerational traumas,” says LaBillois. “Through our ceremonies, we understand who we are as the true stewards of this land.” Driven by traditional teachings, the co-chair of the Assembly of First Nations National Youth Council (now in her third elected term) has been a vocal advocate for sustainability, leading national youth gatherings on climate action and water protection. The Cape Breton University student is also the youth engagement officer at Ulnooweg Indigenous Communities Foundation. Says LaBillois, “Once we all understand that we have an equal responsibility to take care of this land, and we come to work together, only then will we see real change.”

Ashley Wang
24, Toronto, senior associate, SVX; co-founder, Inclusion in Impact Investing

Despite corporate efforts to be more diverse and inclusive, the makeup of the financial services industry remains staggeringly homogenous, says Ashley Wang. “This is why launching Inclusion in Impact Investing (III) was one of my proudest moments to date. [It] combines my work in impact investing with my passion for creating space and belonging for underrepresented individuals.” When she was a teenager, Wang’s family moved from China to Canada, where her parents’ existing credentials were not recognized. “My family inspired my interest in sustainability work,” says Wang. The senior associate at SVX supports a network of more than 1,200 investors in mobilizing their capital toward profit and purpose. Outside of her work at SVX, Wang also co-founded the London Social Value Fund, Ontario’s first youth-led impact investment organization. Says Wang, “By directing capital from traditional financial markets to impact investing, we have the opportunity to get back to our original vision of serving our planet’s and people’s real needs.”

Adam Noble
27, Lakefield, ON, CEO & founder,
Noblegen

“It started with my high school science project, and it’s still going,” says Adam Noble, founder of an innovative food tech company that’s raised $42.5 million in capital so far and employs more than 50 people in Peterborough, Ontario. “Never did we imagine that . . . we’d have a full-on meat analogue that tastes exactly the same as the meat it’s meant to replace.” Noblegen uses a microorganism called Euglena gracilis and starches from local corn and cassava to produce plant-based egg, meat, fish and dairy analogues free of genetic engineering. His next world-saving project: aligning with farmers. “We’re confident that we can enhance the farmer’s relationship with the natural world on a microbial level, and that will supercharge our role in the carbon cycle while continuing to feed the world in a much more sustainable way.” Noble’s winning approach: “Don’t be discouraged if you have to carry the weight of seeing the vision on your own. If you truly want to change the world, think big, and be patient.”

Natalie Pecile
27, Toronto, senior sustainability manager, Restaurant Brands International

Working for a company that has 27,000 restaurants around the globe, Natalie Pecile knew Restaurant Brands International had massive potential to spark progress in the fast food industry. Two years ago, she was offered a newly created role to develop a sustainability strategy for the parent company of Tim Hortons, Burger King and Popeyes. Since then, Pecile has helped establish global policies on deforestation, animal welfare and packaging, as well as brand-new science-based targets to reduce greenhouse gases by 50% by 2030. “My work mobilizing that potential and evolving this massive org from the inside out is a key piece of the puzzle for a more sustainable future that depends on fundamental change across every aspect of our societies,” says the 27-year-old. “If only you put your mind and your time to it, even our society’s greatest challenges can be tackled, by someone just like you, or me.”

Calvin Yang
19, Berkeley, CA, CEO,
Canadian Youth Alliance for Climate Action

After co-organizing the largest climate protest in American history through Fridays for Future International out of New York City in 2019, Calvin Yang had his sights set on greening his home country of Canada. The young media coordinator founded the Canadian Youth Alliance for Climate Action (CYACA), a non-profit Gen Z–led lobbying firm dedicated to advancing non-partisan federal climate policies. “As a young Conservative, I recognize that climate change poses a significant threat to the future prosperity of our society and proactively work with Canadians across the political spectrum to address it together as a country,” says Yang. With a team of engaged young Canadians and industry professionals, CYACA has helped amend climate legislation such as Bill C-12 and partnered with IPSOS to launch a poll aimed at Gen Z voters. Says the University of California, Berkeley, freshman, “It is more important than ever for youth to become engaged in our democracy in this political climate.”

Julie Reimer
29, Kingston, PhD candidate; national president
& Atlantic director, Sierra Club Canada Foundation’s board of directors

Julie Reimer took a winding and unexpected road to sustainability work. The 29-year-old PhD candidate says she grew up with a love for public speaking, studying and volunteering, but it wasn’t until later that she found her passion: the ocean. “Canada has the world’s largest coastline, with ocean to the east, west and north,” she says. “We are a blue nation on a blue planet. Protecting the ocean is essential to humanity. Whether or not you feel connected to the ocean, it is our great unifier.” Her published research has focused on the potential of common tools, such as marine protected areas, to support underwater ecosystems. Reimer is now the youngest president and Atlantic director of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation’s board of directors. She also serves as an all-Atlantic ocean youth ambassador for the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance.

Sumreen Rattan
25, Surrey, BC, co-founder & COO,
Moment Energy

With a surge in the number of electric vehicles on the road, there are millions of batteries that will retire with no place to go – batteries that still have an average of 80% of original capacity. “It’s extremely important to have an end-of-life plan for EV batteries so they don’t end up in landfills and produce toxic waste,” says Sumreen Rattan. “By repurposing [them], we ensure that they are used in second-life applications and go through a circular economy.” Rattan is co-founder and COO of the award-winning start-up Moment Energy. Moment’s batteries are two-thirds the cost of alternative lithium-ion battery storage and are currently used to store energy for off-grid customers. As one of the few female graduates from Simon Fraser’s Mechatronic Systems Engineering program, Rattan is proud of having built the business from the ground up right out of university. She has advice for budding entrepreneurs: “Creating a positive impact and a successful business can go hand in hand. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.”

Sage Lacerte
23, Victoria, founder & CEO,
Sage Initiative

As a Carrier woman from the Lake Babine First Nation in central B.C., Sage Lacerte had a bold idea for “rematriation,” a return to a way of life connected to Mother Earth. In 2019, the 23-year-old birth doula founded Sage Initiative, Canada’s first and only Indigenous womxn’s impact-investment collective: each year, 10 Indigenous womxn meet for six months of trauma-informed training in investment literacy and Indigenous commerce. By investing up to $50,000 annually in Indigenous-owned, mission-led businesses, “we are working to reverse the current paradigm that centres [on] white men by resurfacing the critically important leadership roles womxn have in our economy,” says Lacerte. “There is a gap in the ecosystem that we are working to mend. Reconceptualizing money through a matriarchal lens changes its function to one of facilitating relationships between us rather than dividing us.”

Phil De Luna
29, Toronto, director, National Research Council; former MP candidate, Green Party of Canada

Phil De Luna knows firsthand what happens when an entire community is dependent on one industry. “My father, an autoworker, lost his job when Ford closed their assembly plant. I see the same thing happening in heavy emission industries today.” De Luna has spent his entire career helping Canada decarbonize, starting with his PhD in materials science and engineering at the University of Toronto, where he discovered new renewable ways to convert carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals. He was soon recruited as the youngest-ever director at the National Research Council of Canada, where he leads a $57-million collaborative research program. The Governor General’s Gold Medalist put his dream job on pause to run as a Green Party candidate in Toronto-St. Paul’s in the 2021 federal election, all to help push for more aggressive climate action. “We need to do everything we can to diversify and create a more sustainable economy for Canada, to ensure families have green jobs that will last.”

Julianna Greco
28, Toronto, co-founder & head of growth, Suppli

As a foodie and an environmentalist, Julianna Greco was often conflicted about ordering takeout. “Locally, Toronto serves approximately 39 million takeout meals per year, which conservatively means we are tossing 78 million pieces of waste each year,” she explains. “What’s worse, only 9% of what we place in our recycling bins actually gets recycled.” She and a friend started a reusable-takeout-container service to help the restaurant industry eliminate single-use containers. Suppli’s business model took off during the pandemic as takeout orders spiked. In the 10 months since it launched, Suppli has partnered with 25 local restaurants to save almost 10,000 single-use takeout containers from landfill. Greco’s long-term vision, besides expanding Suppli’s circular economy model into more Canadian cities: “I hope future generations will wonder what a single-use takeout container was!”

Hawa Keita
27, Montreal, executive director,
CEED Concordia

Born in Senegal and raised in France, Hawa Keita took on the position of executive director of CEED Concordia in Montreal at a time when the activities of the organization suddenly became untenable. The non-profit offers Concordia and Ugandan students three-month internships on sustainable community projects in northern Uganda. On the heels of an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, the global COVID-19 pandemic quickly brought the organization to a standstill. Within the span of a year, Keita pivoted CEED’s activities to keep it from folding: she expanded CEED programs into three more countries (Ghana, Senegal and Colombia), brought in new programs for online international collaboration, and launched a national entrepreneurship training program for students that incorporates social justice and environmental business ideas, all while growing CEED’s annual income by 50%. What motivates Keita? “I believe no matter where we are from, we must have the same chances and opportunities. We can achieve a lot together if we view ourselves as one global community.”

Brock Battochio
28, Halifax, engineer & co-founder,
Planetary Hydrogen

Humans will have to figure out how to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in coming years if we’re going to stand a chance of mitigating the effects of global warming. That’s where Brock Battochio and his colleagues come in. At the age of 26, Battochio co-founded a cleantech firm called Planetary Hydrogen, which has patented a device that captures carbon dioxide from the air and stores it in seawater while generating clean hydrogen. Battochio says the company uses an approach called “ocean air capture” that permanently sequesters carbon dioxide while reversing ocean acidification. “There are a range of [climate] solutions, and truthfully, we need them all, but we see the oceans as the highest-scale, highest-impact solution to addressing this problem,” he says. The company counts Shopify among its first customers, and Battochio is leading the technical development of a demonstration plant, expected to open next year.

Michael Vegh
26, Bella Bella, BC, Haíłcístut implementation manager,
Heiltsuk Tribal Council

When Michael Vegh returned home to his coastal First Nation community of Bella Bella this summer, he was tasked with implementing his Nation’s reconciliation process. “‘Haíłcístut’ means ‘to turn things around and make things right again,’ which is the Heiltsuk perspective on reconciliation,” explains the 26-year-old environmental studies grad. Vegh will be implementing $65-million worth of funding for 53 unique projects. “When these projects are completed, dozens of homes will have received critical renovations, new home-ownership will increase, our language will be thriving, hundreds of jobs will be created, we will manage our own seas, and we will have laid the foundation for Heiltsuk self-governance.” The former climate action coordinator for Coastal First Nations is also the lead author of the Haíłzaqv Clean Energy plan. “It’s so fulfilling to bring all this experience home and work for my own Nation,” Vegh says. “I am fortunate to have many mentors who always show me what it means to uphold our Gvi’las [laws] and create a better world for future generations.”

Christine Ward
26, Calgary, sustainability start-up specialist, Radicle consulting firm

Christine Ward specializes in coaching early-stage cleantech companies. “I have coached over 80 start-ups in Calgary to assist them in raising capital.” Ward leads the solar and renewable energy team at Radicle, a leading Canadian sustainability consulting firm, and, as she explains, these are early-stage businesses that will “make up the future of the Calgary economy by creating jobs in new industries to pull Calgary through the energy transition.” Ward uses almost all her spare time to empower womxn and increase diversity in spaces that are typically very “one-tone.” As an outspoken queer woman, Ward says her approach involves fighting for a seat at the table and gaining access to rooms, then pulling underrepresented individuals into those spaces. “I want to see more womxn in leadership and on boards, shattering statistics,” she says. “I want to look back when I’m in my 60s at Calgary’s green economy and thriving technology ecosystem knowing that I made a positive impact.”

Jeremy Clarke
29, Cobourg, ON, president,
Simple Life Homes

Jeremy Clarke started Simple Life Homes as a general contracting company specializing in sustainable housing back in 2012. It became clear to Clarke and his team that just slapping solar panels onto a roof doesn’t make it more efficient or particularly “green.” In 2017, they started building prefabricated high-performance all-natural homes made from wood products that sequester carbon and that are insulated to Passive House standards – homes that are 90% more energy efficient than the average Canadian house. In eastern Ontario, the former VP of Sustainable Cobourg, a local environmental group, is best known as an articulate spokesman for the Passive House movement: “Our homes are storing carbon in the materials they’re built with, helping to drive our carbon footprint down today, which is critical if we’re going to have a chance at combatting the warming of our planet.” Clarke’s next goal: scaling up carbon-conscious housing. “We’re actively working to get more design-and-build partners to use our systems so we can scale together.”

Heather Shilton
28, Iqaluit, NU, director,
Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corp.

Developing renewable energy in Canada’s Arctic comes with its own set of challenges. As the director of Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation (NNC) – Nunavut’s first 100% Inuit-owned renewable energy developer – it’s Heather Shilton’s job to overcome these roadblocks. “The people of Nunavut pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country, and the territory is currently entirely reliant on diesel fuel shipped from the south for electricity generation,” she says. She explains that local off-grid communities don’t have equitable access to the clean, affordable and reliable electricity that folks in grid-connected communities do. “This is a barrier I hope to help remove.” The 28-year-old worked to develop locally owned clean energy projects in Ontario before she moved to Nunavut to support Inuit-owned renewable-energy and energy-efficiency initiatives. Says Shilton, “It’s critically important when thinking about sustainability in Canada to prioritize and centre Indigenous voices as well as those who are most impacted by climate change.”

Madison Savilow
25, Calgary, chief of staff, Carbon Upcycling Technologies; venture lead, Expedition Air

There’s a lot of pressure on consumers to make the most sustainable choices, but, as Madison Savilow notes, consumers aren’t responsible for most global emissions, “nor do they have the resources to make large-scale impact on their own. I want to empower consumers to put the pressure back onto companies to incorporate carbon-sequestering materials into their products.” The Alberta cleantech entrepreneur and chief of staff at Carbon Upcycling Technologies (a Carbon XPrize award-winning Canadian carbon utilization company) founded Carbon Upcycling’s consumer product brand, Expedition Air. Expedition Air is dedicated to selling products made from captured carbon emissions and has facilitated the start-up of more than five companies, and counting, companies that now rely on captured carbon materials. “I hope that Expedition Air becomes a one-stop shop for consumer-facing companies to access decarbonization solutions and materials.”

Aliya Hirji
16, Toronto, youth organizer, Shift Action; youth coordinator,
Fridays for Future Toronto

Aliya Hirji has always had a love for the environment and social justice, but it took her a while to realize these two passions intersected. The high school student and activist has been engaged in the youth climate-strike movement and pushing for systemic change to ensure a safe climate future. Over the last year, she has been mobilizing other students and teachers to call on the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) to divest teachers’ retirement savings from fossil fuels (see p. 33 for more on that). “No longer should our money be invested against a livable future. Together we must demand divestment from climate destruction at every level,” she says. Hirji and other campaigners have successfully pushed OTPP to commit to being net-zero by 2050, as well as some interim targets. She considers this a great start but knows there is so much more to do to ensure these promises are kept.

Austin Zacharko
24, Edmonton, energy management
engineer, Capital Power

Sustainability has always been a polarizing topic in the oil-producing province of Alberta, where Austin Zacharko was raised. “I was able to see both sides,” says Zacharko, a Métis Canadian, though the avid rock climber and backcountry skier began to realize the status quo was no longer protecting the province from the impacts of climate change. His interest in renewable energy led him to a degree in engineering at the University of Alberta, where he co-founded the Indigenous Engineering Students Association. Today, when he isn’t working as an energy management engineer with Capital Power, supporting the company’s wind, solar and thermal assets, Zacharko is helping a local food bank become solar powered. He also volunteers with two national youth sustainability groups, including as co-director of Leading Change Canada’s steering committee. “As the ones inheriting this world, our voices should matter in the decisions that get made today that will impact us for the rest of our lives,” Zacharko says.

Brianna Brown
28, Vancouver, co-founder,
Decade Impact

Brianna Brown co-founded Decade Impact, an impact strategy consulting firm, to help Canadian businesses develop holistic strategies that unlock social and environmental impact. “I started my undergrad in political science and economics in 2011, in the midst of the Occupy movement. I saw a huge disconnect between the theories being taught in the classroom and the movements that were happening on the street.” Brown became fascinated by the role of business. “It is so influential, but it didn’t seem to be engaged in the issues I cared about.” Brown pursued business to start bridging this gap. She specializes in the B Corporation certification process, and in 2019 and 2020, her company, Decade Impact, was responsible for half of all B Corp certifications achieved in the province of B.C. Says Brown, “Small business owners are some of the most innovative and solutions-oriented people out there.”

Faith Edem
27, Ottawa, policy analyst,
Environment and Climate Change Canada

Change agent Faith Edem was born in Nigeria, a country rich in non-renewable fuel sources. “I gained a strong understanding of the impacts energy industries can have on the biodiversity and emission production of a country,” she says. An undergraduate course at the University of Toronto on corporate social responsibility changed her worldview: “I frankly did not know it was possible to hold polluters accountable.” Now Edem, a policy analyst with Environment and Climate Change Canada, develops national climate and energy policies that will help Canada transition to an inclusive, net-zero-carbon economy. “What drives my sustainability work is my commitment to accountability and underrepresented perspectives in the sustainability space,” says the co-author of Our Climate, Our Stories, an anthology by Canadian BIPOC youth. “Those who are represented the least are often affected the most by climate change when we examine global impacts.”

Julie Segal
26, Montreal, senior analyst, impact investing at
the McConnell Foundation

“I never thought I would work in investments,” says Julie Segal. “I’m first and foremost an environmentalist.” Through her work in impact investing, the 26-year-old Montrealer has so far shifted more than $32 million to investments in projects with positive social or environmental outcomes. “Each project is important on its own. But these investments are also edifying. They demonstrate practical alternatives for how our capital markets and economic system can advance the society we want.” While managing the McConnell Solutions Finance Accelerator, Segal has been recognized as a Young Impact Leader for her work developing a strategy for a just transition across the foundation’s portfolio of assets. “I’m proud to bring the perspective of environmental justice to spaces where it is typically ignored,” Segal explains. Segal also helped found two community non-profits, launched a climate-action think tank in Outremont, Montreal, and helps engage youth in sustainable finance issues through the Youth Climate Lab.

Adriana Laurent Seibt
27, Vancouver, co-founder, UBC Climate Hub;
campaigner at Leadnow

Growing up in Honduras, Adriana Laurent Seibt witnessed firsthand the devastating impacts of climate change on low-income, unhoused, Black and Indigenous, women and queer folks in her coastal community of La Ceiba. “After we were hit by two back-to-back hurricanes in November 2020, I managed to fundraise close to $40,000 to buy food, medical supplies, baby formula, water, clothes, and to help rebuild homes,” says Laurent Seibt. “My love for my community sustains my involvement in the climate justice movement.” After moving to Vancouver, she co-founded the UBC Climate Hub, where she mobilizes thousands of students to advocate for climate policy solutions and racial justice. The young Black Hondureña also leads UBC’s Indigenous Engagement Working Group, is a youth representative on the Government of British Columbia’s Climate Solutions Council, and acted as consultant on the City of Vancouver’s Climate Justice Charter. “I want youth leaders to know that another world is 100% possible,” she says.

Kris Kolenc
28, Toronto, manager in research
& sustainability, REALPAC

From the time Kris Kolenc started playing with Lego, he had a keen interest in buildings and the environment. So it made sense that the 28-year-old went on to work in the world of green real estate. In his role at the Real Property Association of Canada (REALPAC), he helps more than 120 Canadian commercial real estate companies strengthen their ESG performance – a particularly important job, given that buildings make up around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As the chair of REALPAC’s ESG committee, he also works with governments to help shape sustainable real estate policy. Kolenc says that while working in the sector can be challenging at times, given resistance to tackling the climate crisis, the demand for sustainability professionals is higher than ever before. “Opportunities in sustainability and the need for climate action [have] never been stronger,” he says. “Now is a great time to get into the field.”

Mina Papic & Brad Moore
26, Vancouver; 29, Victoria,
sustainable infrastructure consultants, Stantec

As the typical lifespan of roads and bridges can be decades long, there are huge environmental implications for the way we design and build them. Civil engineers Mina Papic and Brad Moore know this well: they co-lead a sustainable infrastructure team for Stantec, a design firm ranked by Corporate Knights as one of the most sustainable companies in North America. “The decisions we make today affect the quality of life of future communities and our collective emissions profile for generations to come,” says Papic, who is also an advisor to non-profit Greenroads. Their team helps guide green strategies on infrastructure projects, from high-speed rail and roads to marine and wastewater projects. “Making informed decisions that seek to improve the sustainability of our infrastructure will continue to provide benefits for years to come,” says Moore. In the coming years, the duo hopes to help a growing number of communities integrate sustainability as a critical component of the engineering design and construction process.

*Mina is no longer employed by Stantec. As of October, 2021, she is a sustainability project manager at WSP.

Oriana Cordido De Sola
24, Fredericton, business development
manager, Naveco Power

It wasn’t until Oriana Cordido De Sola arrived in Canada from Venezuela at the age of 18 that she was exposed to the idea of entrepreneurship. She left Venezuela because she had always wanted to study abroad, and the humanitarian crisis in her home country had left few opportunities for young people. Since arriving in Canada, she has applied her twin passions of entrepreneurship and sustainability to her work. “It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, as you can always find the best green practices that are applicable to the company you are a part of,” she says. The 24-year-old has helped develop a small-scale 20-megawatt wind farm at Fredericton’s Naveco Power since she started working there as a student in 2017. Cordido De Sola has also led the charge to install a large array of rooftop solar panels in New Brunswick.

George Radner
25, Vancouver, executive director,
Be The Change Earth Alliance

Ask George Radner why the work he does is important and he’ll tell you about a letter that a girl named Natalie wrote to Vancouver city councillors urging them to take climate action. It was her 14th birthday, explains Radner, but instead of celebrating with family and friends, she asked local politicians to help her secure a safe future on this planet. “Be The Change Earth Alliance provides youth like Natalie tools to navigate climate anxiety, and the skills and support to take meaningful climate action.” His team has provided learning resources to more than 15,000 high school students, teachers and community members to take personal and collective action on climate change in the last two years, and they’ve diverted at least 200 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process. Radner offers some words of caution for budding young sustainability leaders: “Don’t try to do it all alone. Find a community of kind people whom you enjoy being around.”

Brandon Hebor
29, Toronto, AgTech entrepreneur,
founder of Boreal Greens Co.

It started as a pilot project in a 150-square-foot custom-built shipping container turned greenhouse. Brandon Hebor designed and built the “urban farming unit” using a novel vertical design to grow greens and vegetables less than two kilometres from downtown Toronto. Through his social enterprise, Ripple Farms, Hebor grew almost 3,000 kilograms of food and fish from shipping container farms. He also led a team to facilitate educational workshops for more than a thousand students using the high-tech farm as a teaching ground. As a consultant with Crop Coach Canada, Hebor has worked with Indigenous groups on Manitoulin Island and community food centres in the GTA and beyond to help bring agriculture projects to life. He has just launched his newest venture, Boreal Greens Co., growing local herbs and greens using “controlled environment agriculture.” “I see food as the medium through which all people on earth can connect the health and resilience of our bodies and minds to the earth.”

Sophia Yang
25, Vancouver, founder & executive director,
Threading Change

Sophia Yang wears many hats. When she isn’t moonlighting as a techno DJ, the 25-year-old works as a community organizer, fashion justice activist, equity consultant and entrepreneur. Yang, who was born in China and moved to Canada when she was eight years old, founded a youth-led non-profit called Threading Change that seeks to make fashion more ethical and circular. The organization is guided by what Yang calls the six Fs: a feminist, fossil-fuel-free fashion future. She says she was inspired to launch Threading Change when she attended the United Nations climate negotiations as a youth delegate in 2019 (COP25). “I noticed that the only voices on the fashion world stage were the exact companies that were releasing the most emissions, with no representation from the Global South, youth or garment workers,” she says. Yang has since been busy training the next generation of fashion leaders and raising the voices of garment workers around the world.

Sophie Merritt
27, Vancouver, sustainability
manager, MEC

As the sustainability manager at one of Canada’s biggest outdoor companies, Sophie Merritt spotted the opportunity to influence more than 200 outdoor brands to create system-wide change throughout the industry. Thanks to Merritt, MEC (formerly Mountain Equipment Co-op) launched ambitious plans last spring. MEC’s in-house label and all partner brands have aggressive new targets on sustainable materials, fair wages and reducing waste to go circular. New climate targets are in the works. “This work is important because . . . it inspires other companies and consumers to act more sustainably,” says the 27-year-old skiing and surfing enthusiast. And she says that work is fuelled by everyday Canadians pushing their favourite brands to do better. “The pressure you are putting on governments, companies and peers is creating change. I see it every day, so keep fighting for a just and responsible future for all!”

The post Young & relentless: Canada’s top 30 under 30 sustainability leaders of 2021 appeared first on Corporate Knights.