Growing Forward Together

Ten Peaks Innovation Alliance hosted an event in the COP29 CRIN Pavilion, combining pre-recorded interviews conducted by Bill Whitelaw with a live screening in Baku and a hybrid Q&A session. The discussion featured students from Ecole Secondaire Lacombe Composite High School and Ten Peaks board members.

Steven Schultz, Science and Agriculture teacher from Ecole Secondaire Lacombe Composite High School and Ten Peaks Innovation Alliance board member, shared some of the successes of the EcoVision student club at the school over the years, including a geodesic tropical greenhouse, becoming the first school in Canada to keep bees for credit, construction of a two-acre garden with 200 fruit trees and 50 raised beds, a sustainable goat barn with a living roof, and the introduction of 26 sacred Indigenous herbs.

Current students at the school shared some of their recent accomplishments, including Broc Johnson, EcoVision club leader, who recently attended COP 16, The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in Colombia. He helped write the Global Child Biodiversity Declaration, presented it at COP 16 and presented on EcoVision projects during the COP 16 Ecoknowledge fair."

"In this declaration, students from around the world...got together on a virtual platform and wrote down their ideas and issues that they saw around biodiversity and climate disasters and climate change," said Schultz. "They came up with six declarations, and those six declarations got written into this paper...The United Nations Council adopted a child's declaration for the first time in history."

Stijn Tans and Wakefield Roadhouse, members of the United Robotics of Lacombe club, shared details about creating a monitoring system with CO2, humidity, and temperature sensors, three essential factors in a beehive during the winter.

Tans said his advice to other youth looking to get involved in climate action is to "take every shot you can."