Next Monday, students from across B&NES will gather at King Edward’s School for the annual Youth Climate Summit, which this year includes Jonathon Porritt, former Director of Friends of the Earth, as one of the Summit’s key note speakers.

With the aim of inspiring young people to take action in securing a more environmentally friendly future, Summit attendees will include over one hundred pupils from KES, Kingswood, Ralph Allen, St Mark’s and Norton Hill Schools.  It promises to be a hugely stimulating day, as students debate how best to effect change with regards to some of the World’s most pressing environmental issues.  Their conversations and ideas will be much inspired by the impressive roster of speakers, who will additionally run workshops with the pupil attendees.

Organised entirely by a student committee the Youth Climate Summit is now its 11th Year. Speakers at this year’s event are:

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Matt Adam Williams

Matt Adam Williams is a wildlife photographer, a naturalist and an organiser, working with others to build a clean, safe world for people and nature.  He is the presenter and founder of the Wild Voices Project podcast, and currently works for the National Trust as an environmental policy specialist.

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Chris Goodall

Chris Goodall is an English author, businessman, speaker and expert on new energy technologies. He has wide experience in the world of renewable technologies, having consulted large organisations, and has detailed knowledge of cleantech opportunities in the UK and Europe. Chris’s recent projects have been concerning electric cars, community renewables, small vertical axis wind turbines, bio plastics, LEDs and PV.  He owns and operates the website Carbon Commentary, which is part of The Guardian’s Environmental Network, and helped develop the UK’s first employee-owned solar PV installation in 2011 at the Eden Project. His 2016 book The Switch discusses the unstoppable global rise of solar power, and has been hailed as ‘the definitive guide to this great benign change’ by The Guardian.

 

Mark Shorrock

Mark Shorrock is a renewable energy entrepreneur, who first entered the world of green energy in the early 2000s, after a background in the film industry. After specialising in low carbon companies and solar power, he started working towards his first tidal lagoon in 2011, realising the potential for tidal energy in the UK and subsequently creating Tidal Lagoon Power – to begin exploring tidal energy opportunities in six UK locations. The first of these tidal lagoons, the 320MW Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon, was awarded a Development Consent Order in 2015, and initial plans for a subsequent Cardiff Tidal Lagoon were first unveiled in March 2015.

 

Sian Sutherland

Sian Sutherland is an entrepreneur, with a varied background in - advertising, restaurants, film production and brand creation design agencies. In 2017 she co-founded A Plastic Planet, a non-profit organisation with a single goal – to inspire the world to turn off the ‘plastic tap’. Their first campaign, A Plastic Free Aisle, asks supermarkets and retailers to give customers the choice to buy plastic guilt free, in a plastic-free aisle. The campaign has been publicly backed by the UK Prime Minister, leading to huge media coverage, and large numbers of brands, retailers and businesses joining the mission to reduce plastics in supermarkets.

 

Daniel Webb

Daniel Webb is a marketing consultant who has ended up as an artist. In January 2017, Daniel decided to keep all of the plastic waste he produced in a year. The result was ‘Everyday Plastic’ - a huge billboard photo, a visceral and visual sculpture of 12 months’ salvaged plastic. Daniel harboured an interest in plastic pollution since he moved to Margate in 2016. His experiment explores his individual impact on plastic, the learnings and results of which he wants to share with anyone who is willing to listen.

 

Jonathon Porritt

Jonathon Porritt is an environmentalist, writer, broadcaster and commentator who has been in the world of sustainability for a long time – he joined the Green Party in the summer of 1974. After a background in farming in New Zealand and teaching in London, Jonathon became Director of Friends of the Earth in 1984, co-chair of the Green Party from 1980-83, and in 1996 set up Forum for the Future, the UK’s leading sustainable development charity. His book, ‘The World We Made’, was published in 2013, and he received a CBE in January 2000 for services to environmental protection.

 

Nick Bird

Nick Bird works for Bath & West Community Energy and with them has been involved in community projects, network development, volunteer management and training. Bath & West Community Energy aim to supply decreasing local energy demand with increasing generation from renewable energy; this is vital for our future as the need for clean, local energy is only going to increase.

 

Andy Parsons

Andy Parsons has been a member of Greenpeace since he was a teenager.  Andy has researched the effects of climate change on polar ecosystems, working in both the Arctic and Antarctic to see first-hand some of the effects human activities are having. He has also done much campaigning since the 1980s motivated by social justice as we can’t have a socially just world without protecting our environment.

 

Jamie Colston

Jamie Colston is a facilitator and catalyst, creating experiences, inspiring spaces and hosting conversations in which people can take responsibility for turning great ideas into real life action. Over the last 15 years he has been an entrepreneur, social entrepreneur, facilitator and a catalyst managing teams of up to 160 and working with organisations, co-operatives and charities.

 

Juliet Davenport

Juliet Davenport is the founder and CEO of Good Energy, a 100% renewable energy company with a mission to create a greener future. After pondering climate physics at university, Juliet worked in Europe, where she gained a deeper understanding of the energy market, and the idea for Good Energy was born. Since then, the company has grown into a leading innovator of renewables in the UK, and Juliet continues to lead and innovate in the energy sector; in 2013 she was awarded an OBE for services to renewables and in June 2015 was appointed to the board of the Natural Environment Research Council.

 

Thirteen pupils from KES will act as facilitators during the day, and have helped organise the Summit, together with 3 pupils from Kingswood School.  The KES organising committee includes: Tom Wilson, Tash Reid, Jack Bather, Eloise Thorne, Abbey Vaid, Joe Bruton, Alex Rodway, Alana Scott, Claudia Moorhouse, Katie Ghali and Bella Shorrock.

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Abbey Vaid, a pupil at KES, has helped organise the Summit and says, “It’s been really exciting to be part of the Youth Climate Summit for the past two years because it’s given me the opportunity to inspire and educate students, especially those younger than myself. I know that when I leave KES in the summer, there will be well-informed and passionate teenagers continuing to have the really important conversations about our environment, and it really matters to me that I help that process continue.”