From smog to solutions: A journey of climate activism

Lily YangLiu started to worry about climate change while growing up in Beijing, China, breathing in smog everyday. The air pollution was so severe, she developed terrible asthma.

“As a kid, it was awful. The hospital would be wound up with people, especially children who had the same problem,” she said. “I definitely felt the effects of overproduction and consumption and rapid urbanization.”

YangLiu, 16, is now in Grade 11 and lives in Vancouver, where she advocates for better climate change education in schools. She also works as a delegate for the United Nations and attended COP29 this fall in Baku, Azerbaijan as a delegate and panellist. 

Getting youth involved in the climate conversation

When YangLiu moved to Canada, she was captivated by Canada’s beautiful nature and fresh air. The stark contrast to the smog in Beijing gave her a profound appreciation for the environment and motivated her to lobby for better education around climate change and nature in schools. In 2024, she was named one of the top 25 under 25 environmentalists by the Starfish Canada.

“We only teach about climate change in the seventh grade,” she said. “We should start a lot younger, maybe Grade 2 or Grade 3.”

She said she would like to see teachers cultivate love and respect for nature to help children become stewards of the land, forests and oceans. 

Education, she says, should focus more on climate solutions to help children cope with climate anxiety.

“I’ve dealt with climate anxiety because it feels too insurmountable at times,” she said.

Learning about potential paths forward can help students work toward building a more sustainable world, she says, rather than bowing out because it seems too daunting and overwhelming. In her case, getting a grip on her anxiety has helped her stay active in climate advocacy nationally and globally — a role she thinks is important for youth to take on because they will inherit the earth and have the hope and optimism needed to persevere in the fight against climate change. 

Reflections from COP 29 

At COP 29, YangLiu ate a lot of bananas from her hotel room: the food was outrageously expensive, she said.

But that’s not why the conference was a low point in her climate action. She was frustrated by her limited ability to share her voice and opinions at the negotiation table.

“There’s a lot of tokenization of young people at these events, which is something we definitely need to work on,” she said. “It was really sad because I felt that a lot of young people and civil society and NGOs are very much barred from negotiations.”

Her participation was limited to action for climate empowerment (ACE) discussions, which aim to empower all members of society to engage in climate action through education, public awareness, training, public participation, public access to information and international cooperation.

Meanwhile, financial negotiations for the compensation of developing nations — which delegates like her were not allowed to be involved in — concluded with a disappointing result. She said developing countries were hoping for a trillion dollars per year, but only ended up with US$300 billion. She said it’s industrialized countries that are polluting the most but developing countries are the ones paying the costs.

“There’s so many people, especially the lower income countries, being most affected by climate change, and it’s their citizens that are the ones getting sick, but there’s no reparations,” she said.

Future plans

YangLiu is considering studying public policy with a concentration in environmental science at university to put her on a path to becoming a climate negotiator for Canada when she’s older. 

One of her biggest role models is Marie-Claire Graf, a co-founder of the Youth Negotiators Academy, an NGO in Switzerland that advocates for youth to have a meaningful voice in negotiation spaces. Following her own experience at COP29, YangLiu said she would like to see Canada adopt similar programs to bring younger perspectives to the table.

For now, she shares daily climate news on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, to make climate change information more accessible for people living in China. For those in China and anywhere else, she said to be involved in climate action, the first step, she says, is to become informed.