Iris Duquesne is an 18 year old climate activist from France. Duquesne first became aware of climate change during her late elementary school years, according to a podcast interview with The Guardian. She assumed that adults and those in power were doing something to combat the climate crisis, but when she looked into the issue she was underwhelmed by the amount of attention it was receiving. Duquesne said she wanted to “bring [her] opinion to the table and try to do something.”
Elizabeth Wathuti is a 26-year-old climate activist from Kenya. She is the founder of the Green Generation Initiative, which aims to plant fruit trees and focuses on “implementing environmental projects and activities with young people for a sustainable future,” as stated on their website. The site claims they have grown over 30,000 trees. This success has been completed in collaboration with Kenyan middle and high schools, and the website attributes the trees’ 98 percent survival rate to the students’ involvement in keeping them alive.
Nadia Nazar is a 19-year-old artist and climate justice organizer from Baltimore County, Maryland. She is the co-founder of climate justice and activist organization Zero Hour. According to The Baltimore Sun, Nazar was in a middle school environmental science class when she learned about climate change. Part of what inspired her to pursue climate activism was her mother’s work as a marine biologist, according to an interview with the YouTube channel, In the Know Through her mother’s work, she was able to learn about how climate change was impacting animals and the greater world.
Vanessa Nakate is a 24-year-old Ugandan climate justice activist. Nakate began her climate activism in Dec. 2018 due to concerns around the unusually high temperatures in Uganda. She began protesting on her own outside the gates of the Parliament of Uganda in Jan. 2019 to call for the protection of the Congo rainforest, which is facing immense deforestation. Nakate founded the Youth for Future Africa, now called the Rise Up Movement, which aims to tell African climate activists’ stories. Nakate has also been working on the installation of solar panels and institutional stoves in schools to reduce the amount of firewood the schools are using.
Vandana Shiva is a 68-year-old Indian environmental activist with a focus on food sovereignty. Shiva went to school for physics, later pursuing research in the intersection of science, technology and environmental policy. She has written over twenty books, with her first, titled “Staying Alive,” linking the abuse of nature with that of marginalized women living in rural India. This study lead to her future co-authored book “Ecofeminism,” which aims to show how gender, nature and oppression intersect.
Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, known to many as “Little Miss Flint,” is a 14-year-old activist based in Flint, Michigan. Her activism began at just eight years old, when she first became aware of the undrinkable water in her hometown, in which high levels of lead were detected. Copeny began to gain national attention when she wrote a letter to then-President Barack Obama to convince him to come to Flint and see the water crisis firsthand. This letter prompted Obama’s May 2016 visit to Flint. After his visit, he declared a federal state of emergency for the Michigan town and allocated $100 million in aid to address the issue.
