Youth Climate Action Summit
To Help inspire and motivate young people to create more popular support for action on climate change

The Climate Solutions Advancement Network (ClimateSAN) is planning to host an online Youth Climate Action Summit on ________ at __ pm EDT to inspire and motivate young people in communities across Canada to create more popular support for action on climate change.

To help us maximize impact of our summit, we are in the process of reaching out to leading environmental influencers (eg. Link) to share their ideas about how young Canadians, who are concerned about climate change, can increase their impact.   These influencers will be invited to participate live or provide us with pre-recorded short video about their ideas.

Along with providing us with their ideas, we will be asking these leading environmental influencers to share information about our event with their online audience.   If several of them do, we expect many people will learn about this event and watch it live or later (each presentation at this summit can be viewed anytime after it is presented live).

Thumbnail images of 4 videos shown at ClimateSAN.org/car
Thumbnail images of 4 videos shown at ClimateSAN.org/car

Recently, we created this draft webpage for youth entitled “Climate Action Resources”, which contains links to free online videos and information to help young people increase support for action on climate change.   As we learn about more useful free resources available, we will update it further.  Please feel free to share this webpage with your network.  

To promote awareness of the free online resources, we plan to invite leading environmental influencers and environment organizations to share information about this webpage with their online audience.During this online summit, we plan to show some video segments by Greta Thunberg.  For example, we will likely show part or all of the recent excellent video that she created with with the Guardian columnist, George Monbiot about the climate crisis.

This online summit is much simpler and quicker to organize and host than a typical physical conference.  For example, in an online summit, a speaker can join the event live or pre-record their presentation and send it to us.  Then we organize and combine the live segments with the pre-recorded short videos we receive during this event.  To reduce time needed to organize and host this event, we plan to utilize professional virtual summit software by Hey Summit to help us manage the promotion and production of this summit.

Research has shown that educating children may be the best way to reach parents who don’t seem to care about climate change.  Therefore, we expect motivating many young people across Canada to engage their family and friends about climate change could have a critically important impact in increasing support for action on climate change.

To help us host an effective online summit, we welcome volunteers to assist us.  For more details, see: Youth Climate Action Summit Volunteer Opportunities.   In addition, we have some specific projects that we would like see completed such as:
a) Youtube channel that contains short videos by or about Greta Thunberg.
b) Youtube channel that contains the best short videos, which are selected by young people, about climate change.
c) Youtube channel that contains short videos created by leading Canadian climate influencers.

(We expect these Youtube channels will help make it easier for people to quickly identify and share interesting videos relating to climate change.  We plan to highlight these channels during the Youth Climate Action Summit.)

Given below are more details below about our plans:

The goal of our planned online Youth Climate Action Summit summit is to significantly increase the number of young people who advocate for action on climate change through the use of short visuals (images and short videos) in a variety of ways including sharing them on social media.  To host this summit and promote awareness of it, we plan to invite leading climate change influencers to outline their ideas and recommendations about how people can best advocate for action on climate change.

Through this summit, we hope that many young people will be inspired and invest some of their time to become known as climate change influencers in their respective communities.  We feel this is especially important in smaller communities

Each influencer would be invited to join us live or provide us with a 1 to 15 minute video about what they recommend young people do to increase their impact.  As well, we plan to ask each of them to inform their audience (which includes many thousands of followers) about this summit and their planned presentation.  By engaging many social media influencers to provide their advice and promote the event to their followers, we expect the number of people viewing part or all of this online event will be substantial.

Mike Moll, who is also the founder of Social Media House (based in Toronto Centre riding) will provide strategic leadership for this summit.  He is the co-director of a larger media campaign that we are planning to promote action on climate change.

This planned Youth Climate Action Summit is in addition to our plan to promote a news story idea to media outlets entitled “How the Youth Can Help Increase Popular Support for Action on Climate Change”.   It is part of our larger plans to Inspire & Empower the Youth to Increase Popular Support for Action on Climate Change.