UBC Students for Climate Action

This conference is hosted by UBC Students for Climate Action. Our mission is to create meaningful cultural movements required for the task of climate change.

We believe that students – especially those privileged enough to live in Vancouver and attend university – have a responsibility to play a major role in cultural change as well as national policy in regards to inequality, current international policies, and most urgently, domestic policies regarding climate change. In light of this, we have organized a coalition of student organizations at UBC. This coalition includes environmental groups, humanitarian groups. and research groups.

We hope to create a movement on the UBC campus that will steer the climate conversation to become more concerned with tactics of addressing the alarming matter while conversing with and informing students about the reality and size of the problem; the reality of climate change should be widely accepted on an academic campus and so should its serious implications. Students and professors should be utilizing their diverse academic disciplines – physics, economics, social theory, behavioral evolution – to argue tactics. We hope to create an environment where political discourse is not limited to the few students that choose to participate, that instead, through joint action, participation is exciting, enjoyable and popular, so that these kinds of topics will become prevalent in the everyday conversation of students.

We believe that this movement can have a meaningful impact on student votes and turnout in the upcoming election; Because of this, and in light of the the UN conference on climate change in Paris, we have organized a pre-election campaign. For the winter semester, we have a series of creative social events that will allow for serious conversation on how to address climate change. For increasing conversation and accessible information we have organized student-to-student seminars and teach-ins. We also plan to utilize the arts through spoken word poetry, live student written music, impromptu choirs, collaborative paintings (with 1300+ contributors), and many more activities intended to bring students together through art while addressing and being active about important issues and problems. At all our events, we are going to promote students to vote and present them with the platforms of the Canadian parties. We  will end with a large theatrical production called ‘Climate Change Game’.

We need support in providing students with events and speakers that bring the community together and provide the right soil for social action. 

Student Workshops:

3. History of Vancouver University Movements

4. Instituional Stress

Dr. Gabor Maté & Prof. Adele Diamond: Health and Education Conference: Collaborative Painting Project

Community Conversation (weekly): we host UBC students to a weekly organized conversation that brings us together through impromptu choirs, dance, and poetry, along with meaningful conversations on inequality and climate action.

War on Nature - Conversation with David Barsamian: an event where the nature of the climate crises will be discussed, its implications, and necessary action that is required in response.

Climate Change Game Show: this theater production will be fully produced and filmed as a live game show, with live participants. Our goal is to provide an abstract understanding of various important factors that influence the climate change game, with an emphasis on inequality. The ideas of the show are based on social evolutionary theory and economic games.