Forum Jeunesse sur les changements climatiques en Arctique
Petit Séminaire de Québec

If you were to challenge the students at the Petit Séminaire de Québec to organize an event that brings together scientists, researchers, teachers and high school students, you can be sure they will make it a success. This was precisely the case on December 8 when 210 students and teachers from 32 schools across Québec along with forty or so specialists joined forces to take part in the Youth Forum on Climate Change in the Arctic. And the scientific event for experts and non-experts alike helped a number of tomorrow’s decision-makers better understand the impact of global warming on the Arctic and its inhabitants.

It took close to six months of preparation to achieve the final result. A total of 25 students rolled up their sleeves, learned the basics of event planning and assembled all the pieces of the puzzle so as to present a high quality event. “We had to be very disciplined and meet several times as a team in order to carry it off. In fact, teamwork proved to be really important from start to finish,” Secondary 5 organizing committee member Gabrielle Sévigny confided in an interview.

It was following a request from ArcticNet, a network of centres of excellence that brings together a hundred or so researchers from 27 Canadian universities and 5 federal departments, that the school administration and the students at the Petit Séminaire de Québec decided to organize the event. As scientific publications on global warming are generally written for an adult readership, the Youth Forum was seen as an opportunity to provide young people with the proper information, with the avowed goal of prompting them to return to their school and in turn become engines for transmitting information and heightening awareness about the Arctic.

Not everyone would have been able to attract as many participants and, more importantly, as many specialists as the students did. They had to call upon a great deal of dynamism, commitment and above all resourcefulness. “From the start, we wanted to give the students a lot of leeway so that they would truly be in charge of the entire organization. And I must admit, I was impressed,” asserts chemistry teacher Frédéric Gagnon.

From planning the day’s schedule and producing the website to organizing the press conference, seeking out sponsors, managing registrations for the event, the budget and catering logistics, as well as overseeing all the volunteers, the organizers left nothing to chance and their experience enabled them to develop skills that can only be acquired by working in the field. “At first, we saw it as a huge mountain, but we established a solid structure and we had the time needed to make adjustments. It was really only at the Forum itself that we realized just how big a mountain it was,” recounts Jérémie Marcoux, another student member of the organizing committee.

Indeed, the participants at the Youth Forum were spoiled for things to see and hear. They had the possibility of attending three lectures, were entitled to take part in two workshops out of the fifteen on offer and could voice their own opinions during one of the five interactive debates on the program. The participating students, who made up the majority of the participants, thus increased their knowledge on such subjects as the role of the Arctic Ocean in the climate system, the Arctic’s marine ecosystem, the research carried out aboard the Amundsen icebreaker and the sources of contamination that are disrupting the Arctic.

“I was moved to see how Arctic communities are affected by climate change and the impact it has on their culture, economy and lifestyle,” says Gabrielle.

“It’s hard to remain indifferent to their plight and not to talk about the situation to those around us, at school and at home,” Jérémie adds.

The Forum was the first event of its kind organized in Québec as a partnership between ArcticNet and a school and there’s a good chance that this formula will be taken up by others. At the Petit Séminaire de Québec for example the repercussions were instantaneous and the school has already decided to set up a student environmental committee as of next year.

Forum Jeunesse sur les changements climatiques en Arctique
Petit Séminaire de Québec