A year ago, two Oak Park and River Forest High School students – Manolo Avalos and Victoria “Tori” Evans — attended the United Nations annual conference on climate change, COP27, in Egypt.
They were part of a group of high school students sent to the conference under the auspices of a youth environmental group, It’s Our Future, part of the Oak Park-based Seven Generations Ahead environmental group.
By the time you read this, two more OPRF students — Katherine Stabb, who goes by Katie, and Kate Wallace — will have already made the 13-hour, 25-minute flight from Chicago to Dubai, to attend COP28, this year’s conference, held Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 and sponsored by the same group. They are part of a delegation of six Chicago-area high school students going to the conference.
COP28 is the annual UN Climate Summit, in which 98 countries have agreed to work together on addressing the climate crisis. More than 70,000 politicians, diplomats, campaigners, financiers and business leaders are expected to attend.
The COP conferences have made history before. The historic 2015 Paris Agreement limiting “the increase of the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” came out of that and efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” came from COP21, held in Paris, France.
What makes these student trips remarkable is that they are not just field trips. The students who go actively participate in the conference. Katie, a senior, will be part of two roundtable discussions.
“One that’s on school lunches and then one on youth mental health and eco-anxiety,” she said.
Fellow senior, Kate, will be speaking on a panel about climate literacy.
“We sort of brainstormed as a group what specific proposals we could do,” Katie said, “what we have experience with, what we could talk about as a group. We settled on youth mental health, school lunches and climate education.”
When she is not presenting, Katie said she plans on “visiting all the pavilions.” Each participating country has its own pavilion devoted to disseminating information about climate change. Katie also said she plans on “networking with other organizations, interviewing interesting people.”
Note that the event attracts many noteworthy participants. Last year, Manolo and Tori chatted with former vice president and climate activist Al Gore.
“That was cool,” Manolo said. “He’s the climate reality chairperson. He started it and he has a reception every year at COP.”
Katie said she hopes to do something similar in Dubai. “I hope I get to talk to some higher-level policymaker because that’d be really cool.”
Katie explained that she became interested in environmental work as a response to anxiety about the climate crisis “If there’s a chance that we can still make a difference,” she said, “We gotta hold on to it.”
Katie added that she cannot remember a time when she was not interested in the environment. But it was Cory Kadlec’s biology class in the seventh grade at Roosevelt Middle School that really opened her eyes. She recalled: “We raised trout in our classroom all the way up until releasing them into a river in the wild.”
Katie explained that she became more committed to environmentalism after some members of It’s Our Future came to OPRF’s environmental club. It helped that her friend, Manolo Avalos, was already a member of the group.
But what made Kate Wallace want to apply to go to COP28?
“I’ve been involved in Model UN at OPRF and in Model UN conferences. Some of the things I’ve debated at Model UN are environmental-related. So, to be able to go to the real United Nations was really exciting. Also, it’s a huge learning opportunity to meet people from across the world and learn a lot more about climate issues,” she said.
Katie echoed her excitement: “For the last two years, I’ve watched other people from It’s Our Future who have come back from COP and shared their experiences. That inspired me. And so hopefully I can do the same. So, I’d like to make more ripples inside of OPRF and in the community. This is a real UN event, and real policy goals have come out of past ones, right? We talk about the Paris Agreement, maybe in 10 years we could be talking about the Dubai decision.”