Don't wait until you are in your later years to begin making an impact, climate change isn't going to wait until you catch up, we need today's innovators, and today, young people are stepping up to the task like never before. Young people have access to the newest technologies, they are dealing with a larger sense of urgency, and they tend to have a more imaginative approach to the solutions that adults would have missed. Even today, young people are building the future of clean energy and sustainability, even if that is only by coding apps to help reduce emissions, launching DIY solar, starting green clubs in their schools etc. Young people are already doing climate tech and not listening to theory anymore. If you have ever wondered how you can be an active participant in fighting climate change with real impact, this guide will provide you with 10 ways you can participate, be impactful, and have a creative and equitable role today.
1. Launch Your Own Climate Tech Project
One of the most obvious paths to make a difference in the climate space is to pursue a personal innovation project based in the areas of sustainability or renewable energy. Teens can feel pressured that they need some sort of laboratory or large grant to take on such a project - but this is not the case. You just need a problem that you are passionate about, some basic tools, and a willingness to treat this project like a learning experience. Teens can create solar powered devices from recycled electronic parts; build software programs for carbon footprint calculators; and fabricate water filtration systems out of open-source science. The trick is to notice a community climate challenge (energy waste, insufficient water supply, pollution) and solve that challenge with an inquisitive mindset.
Your project doesn't need to be complicated either - you could create a vertical farm design plan for city environments or a prototype app for school electricity usage. Because of resources like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or MIT App Inventor the barriers to entry are very low. There are abundant tutorial and constructive project ideas available on YouTube, Instructables, and GitHub!
Do not diminish the importance of documenting and sharing! It could take the form of a blog, a mini-documentary, or a social media expose of your project. Your innovation can motivate others, and possibly even photos etc., or generate interest from mentors, competitions, and investors along the way. Additionally, you may also find that participating in science fairs and/or competitions may allow you to meet other like-minded teens as well as industry professionals. After all, you are not just solving a problem; we are building a portfolio of action to demonstrate to the world what teens can contribute to advancing the climate tech industry.
2. Join or Start a School-Based Renewable Innovation Club
If you find all of the climate innovation related work you are doing overwhelming, you may want to consider becoming involved as a part of something bigger by getting together with classmates or a peer group as a climate innovation club. A climate innovation club allows you to co-experiment, and co-experience learning and problem solving with your peers. If your school does not have a climate innovation club, you might want to consider starting one because you might be pleasantly surprised at how many people in your school community like teachers, parents, and local businesses would join you in supporting your club. Your climate innovation club could be the centre of everything from small scale wind turbines to installing solar panels, creating energy audits, and even lobbying your school to ban single use plastics in your cafeteria.
A climate innovation club is also a space that can host hackathons, idea incubation, and innovation sprints, all great forms of generating creative solutions to local environmental problems.
As a collaborative space, the students can invite guest speakers from the renewable energy industry, create workshops with local engineers or environmental scientists, and compete as a group or team in university or international competitions. Through the club, you can crowd fund projects, apply for youth innovation grants, and create connections and impacts that can exist outside the walls of your school.
3. Develop or Contribute to Open-Source Climate Software
In a coding world, software solutions are providing a meaningful role in responding to climate change. Softwares is used to track energy consumption or to provide carbon offset solutions; software is scalable and efficient in achieving impact. As a teenage programmer, even with minimal skills, there are ways to contribute to open-source climate tech. Examples could include developing a simple calculator that puts an estimate on emissions associated with lifestyle practices or working in collaboration to produce an open-access climate data visualization tool. GitHub is fueled with repositories related to climate solutions needing contributors, and contributing to these projects is a great way to learn while helping the planet.
If you're looking to create something from scratch, consider creating tools that would potentially help your school, community, or area. How about creating a bus-tracking app rewarding students for getting on a bus (rather than using a private vehicle)? Or, perhaps a digital dashboard helping schools visualize and reduce daily energy consumption. With your skills, the effort isn't in creating complicated tools, it simply needs to address a real problem.
There has never been an easier time to learn to code than now, FreeCodeCamp, Code.org, and Harvard's CS50 via edX are just a few examples of the platforms available that do not charge for their amazing content.
4. Design Low-Cost Renewable Energy Solutions for Your Community
When teenagers think about the mundane needs of the world, they sometimes approach thinking differently. This mode of thinking can be ideal to assess practical renewable energy solutions that are affordable, accessible and feasible. The solution could be in the form of a solar lantern that can be used in dark areas, a bicycle powered phone sitting out in the sun, or a cheap irrigation pump utilizing wind to pump the water. The innovations do not have to be extreme; they just need to work.
To start, determine if there is an energy or emissions challenge in your area and consider how renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, and biomass can be leveraged to address the challenge. Prototyping with locally sourced materials, working with small local businesses, and testing your ideas with your neighbors could yield results that work for the people involved, but also for everyone owned by the abundance of renewable energy resources. Working on hands-on solutions gives you not only the opportunity to develop your skills with renewable energy technology but also gives you exposure. With this exposure you deepen your empathy to help your local community!
5. Conduct Citizen Science Research Projects
It also gives youth the opportunity to participate in real research that contributes to real science without being part of a big group. As a youth, you can either be a participant or a leader in local environmental and climate monitoring in your area, including things like air or water quality, changes in local weather conditions, collection of biodiversity information in the nearest parks. All of these pieces of information can then be brought together into a big dataset and provided to researchers, governments, and NGOs.
Youth may collect some of this environmental data using some combination of a smartphone, GPS, or simple sensors, and may analyze that data with free software. They could also publish their results or present them to a council, which could then influence policymakers locally and at the grassroots level. However, the experience of being involved in citizen science can help you develop your own scientific inquiry, build trust in your analytical thinking and decision-making, and have experience collecting and using real data.
6. Build or Join Climate-Focused Startups and Youth Accelerators
Increasingly, more youth are starting their own climate initiatives or applying to youth accelerator programs that help youth-led innovation and support solutions in the green economy. An accelerator gives you access to mentors, funding, business development training, and a community of other youth that want to do climate solutions.
If you have an idea for reducing emissions, creating energy efficiencies, or establishing long-lasting sustainable habits, youth-based incubators are an excellent way to investigate this more. You may want to develop new renewable products, to do sustainability consulting work, to start a green e-commerce shop, or to do something related to environmental education work. The start-up culture will challenge you to think big and be more ambitious. Regardless of whether your start-up comes to fruition, the experience, skills, connections, and knowledge gained will be much greater.
7. Create Climate Content to Raise Awareness and Spark Action
Climate communication is just as essential to the matter as technical innovation. In the conversation about climate change, teens have an important role to play in building awareness, and responding to preconceived notions about climate communication via producing engaging, impactful, and action-oriented pieces of content that can demystify climatic issues for peers, community, and the greater public via blogs or videos, or podcasts, social media campaigns, and even stories through art and music.
The context of climate information needs to be both current and available, and yet not overwhelming. Teens can effectively break down content on topics that seem complicated, such as carbon pricing, greenwashing, regenerative agriculture, or any other overwhelm with digestible content that people are actually encouraged to share. When creating this kind of content consistently and in an authentic way, the storytelling has the potential to mobilize entire networks to one way or another take action, donate, vote with their dollars or change their practices.
8. Use Artificial Intelligence to Solve Environmental Problems
AI is one of the most effective methods for climate innovations and young individuals interested in machine learning or data science can leverage AI to approach sustainability issues. There are plenty of opportunities to do this. This can involve AI predicting and visualizing patterns of deforestation, optimizing the energy use of smart homes, etc.
A formal education is not necessary to get started with AI—with free online resources about data science and machine learning, free forever cloud environments like Google Colab, and many publicly available datasets, like those from Kaggle and fast.ai, you can build your own models. Whether it is image recognition of illegal dumping to monitor and track the progress of illegal dumping or natural language processing to delve into the effect of the policy documents, AI will enhance your ability to automate tasks or surface insights that are very difficult to identify manually.
9. Participate in National and International Climate Competitions
There are countless climate and sustainability competitions available to teens, with not only prize money at stake, but opportunities for mentorship, exposure and scaling your ideas. Competitions include engineering competitions, environmental design competitions, climate policy simulations and pitch battles.
Participating in these competitions teaches teens to refine ideas, work collaboratively in time-pressured environments and give and receive professional feedback. And even if you do not win, you learn resiliency, project management and communication, all skills that climate leaders of the future need.
10. Advocate for Climate Policy at the Local or School Level
Lastly, one of the most impactful but least recognized actions youth can take is advocacy. You don't need to be a politician to influence climate policy. As a student, you can advocate for your school board to adopt sustainable practices, lobby to get local governments to adopt green infrastructure, and establish youth climate councils to encourage youth engagement for decision-makers.
Advocacy work connects inspiring ideas to practical action through lobbying to change laws, funding, or community habits. Whether that means advocating for the cafeteria to have composting, advocating to incorporate climate studies into the curriculum, or advocating for incentives for green transportation, engaging in policy gives practice to your advocacy as it works to change the structure. It also cultivates the image of youth as beyond future voters, youth are current stakeholders.
If you are a high school student pushing yourself to stand out in college applications, RISE Research offers a unique opportunity to work one-on-one with mentors from top universities around the world.
Through personalized guidance and independent research projects that can lead to prestigious publications, RISE Research helps you build a standout academic profile and develop skills that set you apart. With flexible program dates and global accessibility, ambitious students can apply year-round. To learn more about eligibility, costs, and how to get started, visit RISE Research’s official website and take your college preparation to the next level!
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