Commissioners Kiera O'Brien and Naina Agrawal-Hardin recently wrote an opinion piece in USA Today about the need for K12 Climate Action.

For Gen Z, climate change is a clear and present danger to our planet

The solutions to climate change that we learn about as young people have been inadequate or nonexistent.

By Kiera O’Brien and Naina Agrawal-Hardin

In America, climate change is often portrayed as a ticking time bomb of far-off devastation through videos of dying polar bears, melting ice caps and rising flood waters. Rarely do we confront the cost that climate change is already having on lives across the globe, especially in marginalized communities.

Yet, after events in our families’ own backyards in the waterways of Ketchikan, Alaska, and the mountains of Tennessee, we each realized at a young age what our schools didn’t tell us: Climate change is an immediate threat.

Despite growing up more than 3,000 miles from each other, we have witnessed some of the same consequences of climate change, and we know that its urgency is not up for debate.

In Ketchikan, record-breaking temperatures and rainfall threaten the ecosystem Alaskans rely on for subsistence. In Tennessee, the risk of floods and even uncontrollable wildfires worsens every year.

In the world around us, climate change has altered the color of oceans, decimated homes and, recently in the west, set hundreds of thousands of acres on fire. The devastation of the climate crisis is clear. Yet the solutions to climate change that we learn about as young people have been inadequate or nonexistent.

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