Adirondackers have traveled across the globe to contribute to Sri Lanka’s first Youth Climate Summit, taking place Friday through Sunday.

Wild Center Director of Programs Jen Kretser and Adirondack Youth Climate Program Coordinator Katie Morgan, both of Saranac Lake, are attending the summit with college students and Youth Climate Summit alumni Jack Gallagher and Amanda Bruha.

“We’re really excited because we really want to listen and learn,” Kretser said. “We’re excited to see how the youth summit translates to another country. We’ve done that before, working in Finland to help get a youth climate summit started there. Now looking at how it might apply, not only to a different country and island nation that’s really on the front lines of climate change through sea level rise and a host of other impacts, but also working at the university level, and working with other non-governmental organizations and the government.”

The four will participate in the event, which was inspired by The Wild Center’s summit, as keynote speakers and workshop leaders to discuss climate change and action plans with more than 100 university participants, Kretser said. The participants were selected from more than 250 applicants across the country.

“We will have the opportunity to lead a workshop on climate action planning,” Kretser said. “This will be a workshop that’s focused on those students creating plans for their schools and communities to work on. It could be anything, working to save energy, working on food issues, water sanitation, recycling programs, so there’s a host of things they can be focused on.”

She added the summit is particularly important for the island nation as climate change will have effects such as rising sea levels, extreme weather events, drought and water scarcity, which will alter the country’s way of living.

“Our understanding is that there is not a lot of climate change education in Sri Lankan schools, either at the lower level or at the university or college levels,” Kretser said. “One of the things we’re hoping is that we can help present the best available science on climate change, looking at it from both a global perspective, but also what’s happening at a local level in Sri Lanka and sharing the stories of what we’ve seen happening here.”

She said there are quite a few connections between Sri Lanka and the Adirondacks, even though the locations are on opposite sides of the planet.

“We’re both heavily reliant on tourism,” Kretser said. “The Adirondacks has an incredible winter culture. The impacts that we could feel and have felt like last winter, we really didn’t have a winter, and we’ve certainly had an increase in storms and storm precipitation, like Hurricane Irene. Those have devastating impacts on communities.

“(Sri Lanka) is also experiencing similar things between sea level rise with increase in storms, flooding and landslides being a big issue,” she said. “They also have really incredible biodiversity. They have quite a large population of wild Asian elephants and one of the largest populations of wild leopards in the world. Climate change could impact that habitat and impact that biodiversity in those unique ecosystems, similar to the unique ecosystems that exist here in the Adirondacks.”

One of the main ideas of the youth climate summits is to educate and give students the tools to come up with solutions to adapt to a changing climate, Kretser said.

“What do we need to look at in terms of renewable energy?” she said. “What do we need to look at in terms of how we can grow resilient communities and support that? Those are things that I think we find to be very empowering, and also there is a level of civic engagement.”

Kretser said she hopes the summit will let the students develop their leadership skills.

“They’re going to be decision-makers, they’re going to open businesses, and they’re going to enter into the world of work,” she said. “We want them to have those 21st-century skills of critical thinking, decision making, creativity, innovation, all of those pieces, and we think that learning through projects like this really helps make this happen.

“One out of four people in the world is a young person, somebody under the age of 25,” Kretser said. “They care about this issue, they’re super-connected, they see what’s happening, and they are very much engaged civically, so they want to do something about it.”

The idea for the Sri Lanka summit came about a year ago, when Kretser received an email from Dr. Novil Wijesekera of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health’s Disaster Preparedness and Response Division.

“(Wijesekera) said he had found information about our Youth Climate Summits that we had been doing for the last eight years,” Kretser said. “We have created an online toolkit that anybody can look at and download for free, and he saw that and said, ‘We we’re thinking about doing something like this, and you guys seem like the experts. Can you help us?’

Kretser said the Wild Center was more than happy to help and began working with a core team of about seven people from Sri Lanka online via Skype, email and social media for the last nine months to plan the event. She said the 11-hour time difference was rough, but the two teams worked through it to strategize and share ideas.

“We’re really excited to see how they’ve taken the model we’ve created and made it their own, really connecting it to Sri Lanka and the issues that are happening there around climate change,” Kretser said.

The Sri Lankan team identified funding through the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, the nation’s capital, and the two groups worked together to apply for and receive grant money to put on the event.

The Wild Center brought Gallagher and Bruha into the mix as they have been youth climate leaders in their communities, Kretser said. They are both college freshman, attending Paul Smith’s College and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, respectively.

“Both of them have been involved with our Adirondack Youth Climate program for the last two to three years,” Kretser said. “Their leadership has been really quite incredible, really stepping up in their respective high schools, when they were high school students in Keene and Lake Placid, to take on projects and to lead meetings. They’ve also done work in their communities: speaking, doing climate change awareness talks and working on different projects. We were looking at their leadership skills and aptitude, and we knew that they would both represent the Adirondacks and the United States well.”

The Community Resilience Center, the U.S. Department of State’s Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund, U.S. Embassy in Colombo and the Sri Lankan Climate Change Secretariat of the Ministry of Environment have all supported the Sri Lanka summit. (The Adirondack Daily Enterprise)