Oak Park and River Forest High School seniors, Poppy Booth and Elora Cianciolo, will be attending the United Nations climate change conference, or COP29, along with OPRF Superintendent Greg Johnson and Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman.
World leaders and experts come together once a year to discuss the climate crisis and potential solutions at the climate conference. Young champions of climate advocacy attend, too.
Booth and Cianciolo are not the only Chicagoland students attending. It’s Our Future, the youth climate advocacy program of Seven Generations Ahead, is sending five area students to Baku, Azerbaijan, where the conference is taking place.
Scaman and Johnson were both invited by Gary Cuneen, founder and executive director of the local Seven Generations Ahead nonprofit. The Oak Park contingent will be attending for various days throughout the conference, but none will be there for the entire time.
Student perspectives
Booth said her interest in climate change was sparked at the environmental club at OPRF, a group she now leads as co-president. Around 60 students are involved with the club that initiates climate-related projects around the school, she said.
In the cafeteria, the group is growing lettuce through hydroponics, a means of growing plants in a water-based solution rather than in soil. In the school garden, Booth said the group works to grow native plants. The club also assesses the school’s sustainability plan, giving it a grade in each category.
Johnson said the plan relates to areas including greenhouse gases, waste production, education goals and food goals. It’s great that students are helping to keep the school accountable to its goals, he said.
Booth said in college she wants to study civil engineering and learn ways to adapt the field to account for climate change.
At COP29, she said she’d like to learn about the impact of women and girls in conversations regarding climate change. People might not think about that, she said.
“If they think about climate change, or even thinking about climate justice, gender isn’t always brought into it, but it is a significant factor,” Booth said. “Women and girls, especially in developing countries, are normally more impacted by climate change because of the roles that they typically hold.”
Booth said she wants to make connections with people she might not otherwise meet at COP29.
“I’m really excited to be able to talk to people who are from all around the world, and who have had a lot of different experiences around climate change and hear about their lives and their perspectives,” she said.
Cianciolo said her love for animals inspired her interest in climate change. She has five rescued pet birds, that helped her understand how sensitive animals are to small changes.
“[Birds] are a danger to themselves, and everything is a danger to them,” she said. “It’s interesting seeing that on a global scale.”
Her family works to implement environmentally friendly gardening practices, Cianciolo said, including raking leaves into their garden bed.
At COP29, Cianciolo said she’s excited to explore topics related to biodiversity, sustainability and conservation. Europe, for example, has launched rewilding programs, trying to reintroduce animals that have gone extinct or disappeared from their lands back into their native environments, Cianciolo said.
Cianciolo said she’s also looking forward to speaking with people who experience climate change firsthand. In the Midwest, residents might not be feeling the most severe impacts of climate change.
The young activist said she plans to study zoology and fisheries and wildlife management in college.
“It’s important for people to know that climate change is becoming an even more pressing issue as time continues and the impacts get worse,” Cianciolo said. “It’s no longer a far off problem that can be put on the sidelines.”
Local leaders
Johnson said OPRF students have been sent to the United Nations’ climate conference for three years now. He said he’s “incredibly privileged” to be able to attend with Booth and Cianciolo. Attending with other local leaders, like Scaman, will also help deepen the village’s commitment to sustainability, he said.
He said the school districts, like the District 97 elementary schools and OPRF, are working to sync their policies with the village’s to create efficient efforts to promote sustainability locally.
The OPRF superintendent said he’s looking forward to attending education-related sessions at the climate conference and for an audience with Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. He’s interested in learning how different organizations are working with available resources to achieve climate goals.
“If we’re going to really be as effective as we want to be as an organization on this, we need to be working with folks in our community and our state,” he said.
Scaman said attending COP29 will be an opportunity to hear about the future of meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, to listen to youth-led solutions and to better understand what best practices and policies need to be instituted.
Oak Park has taken advantage of grants from President Joe Biden’s administration that provided dollars for municipalities of all sizes to help address climate change. Scaman said she can only hope that federal officials can advocate for those funds to continue, given the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
President-elect Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” plans to boost United States fossil-fuel production. He may also pull out of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, again.
The local goal, however, is to implement the recommendations in the Climate Ready Oak Park plan.
“The municipality [is] only a piece of a much bigger puzzle to a collective plan,” she said. Every level of government is part of that puzzle. And residents. And businesses.
“We have to remain positive in our advocacy,” Scaman said. “If we allow ourselves to get too depressed with the tornados that we see across the nation, with the change in temperatures, with the obstacles that still exist and the energy that it requires to address those … we’re not going to be effective in our advocacy.”
Local, regional and global efforts are all essential. And Oak Park can be a leader in addressing local barriers to combatting climate change, Scaman said. The village president has four grandchildren she keeps in mind, too, when looking toward the future.
“We need them to inherit an earth where they can live fruitful lives,” she said.