When we think about climate action in schools, it’s easy to focus on the physical: the solar panels on rooftops, the gardens in schoolyards, the bikes in bike racks. But before any of those things can exist, something less visible must happen first: young people have to learn, understand, and believe that their actions matter.
That’s what these three schools have in common. From Dawson City to rural Saskatchewan to the riverbanks of New Brunswick, these three projects put education, skills training, and cultural connection at the center of their climate work, and the results speak for themselves.
Communities in Canada’s North are among the fastest to feel the effects of the climate crisis. Melting permafrost, unpredictable temperatures, and increasingly severe wildfires are not abstract threats for students at Robert Service School; they are lived realities. With support from N:OW for Net-Zero, shop teacher Peter Menzies led a week-long intensive training program in which 20 students learned to design net-zero and climate-resilient building prototypes, with an additional 33 students participating part-time across different disciplines. Five community members attended evening sessions at the school, bringing local tradespeople and Indigenous elders into the conversation alongside Western scientific approaches.
The prototypes were presented at the Yukon Science Fair, and the project has since evolved into a physical building plan for the school’s shop program, a real structure designed to help address climate-resilient housing shortages in the community. The project was also featured by CBC News in a piece exploring how amendments to the Yukon Education Act could help more students earn credit for locally developed, place-based courses exactly like this one.
Energy literacy is a foundational piece of the climate conversation, but for too long, that conversation has excluded Indigenous perspectives entirely. The youth-led initiative Indigenous Voices for Energy Literacy noticed a glaring gap in Canadian high school curricula: little mandated energy literacy and virtually no representation of Indigenous peoples in clean energy. Their response was to build something that didn’t exist yet.
Indigenous Voices for Energy Literacy is closing a glaring gap in Canadian high school curricula by developing videos and hands-on resources that feature Indigenous clean energy champions and give both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students an informed, culturally grounded stake in Canada’s energy future. Photo courtesy of N:OW for Net-Zero.
IVEL developed educational videos featuring Indigenous clean energy champions who speak to the just transition happening in their own communities, paired with hands-on activities from an existing energy toolkit. The resources are designed to be culturally relevant and inclusive, covering topics from renewable energy to climate change through an Indigenous lens. The project was built in partnership with the Lac La Ronge Indian Band and the First Nations Power Authority, centering Indigenous voices as the foundation of the curriculum itself (round of applause for them!).
The goal is ambitious and necessary: to empower both Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners to become informed, active participants in so-called Canada’s energy future and to ensure that future is just.
Along the banks of the Wolastoq, the Saint John River, students from four Wolastoqey schools did something that is at once ancient and urgently contemporary: planting trees. Through their “Wicuhkemtultine” (Let’s Help One Another) project, 88 students and 12 educators collected seeds from culturally significant native species, such as birch, sugar maple, cedar, and black ash, and learned about their ecological and traditional significance. The project aimed to plant 400 white spruce trees, which could sequester 8,040 kilograms of carbon annually once mature.
Along the banks of the Wolastoq in New Brunswick, students from four Wolastoqey schools are collecting seeds from native species to plant 400 white spruce trees, reconnecting Indigenous youth to their culture and land while sequestering more than 8,000 kilograms of carbon annually once the trees mature. Photo courtesy of N:OW for Net-Zero.
But this project is about more than carbon numbers. Indigenous youth in New Brunswick’s school system have often felt disconnected from their culture and community, and this project was designed specifically to change that. Working alongside both Indigenous knowledge keepers and environmental scientists from Natural Resources Canada, students learned through a Two-Eyed Seeing approach that honours both ways of knowing equally.
Together, these three projects remind us that climate education is not one-size-fits-all. It is place-based, culturally rooted, and most powerful when young people are trusted to lead it.
