You never had to consciously think about breathing before the asthma attack and now you're having one and you're trying to remember how to breathe. Your chest is constricting. You can't get enough air. It's terrifying because you don't want to be that person that died from an asthma attack. I am from South shore. It's a neighborhood on the South side of Chicago and South shore is primarily people of color. It's a primarily black community. Often times you'll have like highways, which are really big sources of pollutants and contributors to air pollution in black and Brown neighborhoods. There's a lot of cold fire power plants on the South side. There's a lot of industries on the South side, which not only is harming air quality, it's harming soil pollution as well, and so there's a contaminated soils over there. There's contaminated air. A lot of children have asthma or other types of lung diseases because of the air they're breathing. Climate change disproportionately affects low income and marginalized communities such as communities of color, but the resources to litigate those effects are not funneled into those community. Imagine having to deal with contaminated soil where your kids can go outside and play and contaminate the air, which you just can't avoid and not having the resources to deal with that. And so you just continue to getting sick. It upsets me, sometimes I feel like there's very little I can do it about it. A lot of the work I do on campus is about environmental injustice and it's upsetting because it's not as unintentional as people think. And when you're talking about solutions to environmental problems, why is it that often these voices are left out of the conversation? Why aren't there more black and brown faces and people from the low income shoes or people living next to a coal fire plant and the conversations about solutions to climate change? Like where are they? I would tell all of my lawmakers to make sure that they're listening and including the communities that they're going to while switching to clean energy. I don't understand why we have to fight for clean air and clean water. We need clean air to live. It's time to take action and we need to do something about it. One of the best ways to start is by voting. We are the next generation. We're going to be the future politicians and scientists and activists and so it's important for young people to go out and vote. So they have their voices heard and they make a statement like, this is what I believe, this is what I'm fighting for and I'm not going to support someone who is against that. My name is Brandon Kirk. I'm a sixth generation farmer and I'm from Kennesaw, Georgia. We've been on this land since before the civil war. So we have to feed the chickens. We feed the pigs, we come out every day, water them. We also collect eggs every day. I started to see the effects of climate change really happening in my backyard. Most people don't understand how climate change can affect both flooding and drought, but that's what's been happening in Georgia. That's made it harder for us to produce and be able to consistently provide crops to our market. Well, I think it's really important to advocate to people about climate change and its effects because once you know, it really changes your life. My dad and I are a part of a Cobb County Farm Bureau and our focus is really going out to classrooms and educating them about agriculture, climate change ways they can help. It's really important for you to know about, climate change and care about it because one day we will be the future leaders and we're the ones that are going to go out and vote and make policy and we're the ones that are going to make it change. People think that climate change is some far off problem but it's not. It's happening right here and right now and we're living with it. Miami is a city living in ground zero. I'm scared to imagine it underwater. After a hurricane in my community, the water, the canal had come up to our house and like everything was just a mess in this backyard. There were trees everywhere. All the power lines were down and also just boats right next to a house on the road. It kind of looks like the end of the world sometimes. As they continue to get worse, they have to change the categories of a hurricane because they become so destructive. You have the fear that it's not going to be the same as the last one. Is it going to be even worse? Is it just going to pass by? There's a lot of uncertainty and I think that uncertainty is what brings a lot of fear, especially to me. That's when I realized that I had to do something as a young person who might not have a future. I'm taking action on climate change through taking political action, which I think is very important for youth. We aren't getting the attention from politicians that we need and it's scary because it's our future in their hands. I am the state lead for U.S. youth climate strike. There's a lot that has to go on into organizing a strike. Is this right? Do we have this ready for the strike? Do we have the speaker? I need to contact this organization. I need to contact this person. I need to make sure that we have certain amount of people. It's a lot that a high schooler should not have to worry about. It is difficult to think about how we're going to address the climate refugee crisis when there's going to be more and more climate disasters. What do we want? CROWD: Climate justice When do we want it CROWD: Now Because of our massive strikes. Miami beach declared climate emergency and the city of Miami also declared climate emergency. People tell us, you know, strikes aren't going to work. Just wait until you can vote. We don't have the time to wait until we can vote, so we strike. I think seeing a lot of people, who are young out in the streets does matter and people are listening.