You wouldn’t be wise to underestimate the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition.
If that sounds like a cool name for an after-school club of teenagers that can’t possibly be doing much of anything significant, then prepare to be surprised.
Members of the coalition, ages 13 to 20, spent 16 months engaging leaders of the Tucson Unified School District and crafting a climate action resolution that might be one of the country’s most comprehensive initiatives. It’s all in there: electric transportation, energy efficiency, electrification, sustainable food systems, climate education.
The resolution passed on Oct. 29 in a vote of the school district’s governing board. Key commitments include:
There’s plenty more, too, on cooling centers, battery reserves, reduced water use and increased composting.
Reilly Loveland Falvey, who provided support to the coalition as an energy efficiency expert with the New Buildings Institute, is still stunned by the effort made by the students.
“When we started talking to them about funding mechanisms and sustainability targets, they already knew some of those things,” Falvey says. “The RFP specifically called out the climate in Tucson. (The students) listened and took the time. They showed so much maturity and awareness.”
Climate concerns are a big deal in Tucson, which had 112 days of triple-digit temperatures this year. Blast-furnace summers are the usual, and a livable future can seem out of reach during a withering stretch of 110-degree afternoons.
Ojas Sanghi, co-leader of Tucson’s chapter of the coalition, was a climate activist casting about for a target when he was a student at University High School.
“The city and county were working on action plans,” Sanghi says, “so I started looking at other places that could help advance climate action. I noticed that no one had done much with schools. This was a huge opportunity.”
A core group of about a dozen students dived in with him, widening the scope of the project as they went along. School board member Sadie Shaw became an ally, serving as a contact point for the coalition and helping to shepherd the resolution.
Sanghi, now a computer science major at the University of Arizona who wants to find ways of using artificial intelligence in clean energy, says he spent some of his childhood in Delhi, India. Those years made an unfavorable, unforgettable impression.
“I saw firsthand the impact of environmental degradation,” he says. “That centered my worldview. I started to connect the dots: This will affect every other issue.
“I wanted to do something that was uniquely impactful and moved the needle.”
Without much of a template to follow, research became a heavy lift for the coalition. The students combed through hundreds of documents, and Sanghi admitted there were times when they wondered if anything would come of the work. Believing that it mattered, they kept going.
Owen Brosanders, a high schooler who worked alongside Sanghi, says the result went “above and beyond” his expectations.
“We’re shifting toward educating people on how we got this done,” Brosanders says. “If you show that you want to create real change, people like to see that. Tucson is specifically impacted (by climate), and we can make some measurable change.”
The school district is expected to convene a student oversight committee to continue work on climate issues, Sanghi says.
Doug Carroll is a freelance writer based in Chandler, Arizona.
