The City of Toronto’s climate action strategy, called the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy, identified supporting youth leadership on climate action as a key priority for the City. The City of Toronto and a team from the University of Toronto, together with Toronto’s youth leaders and community, undertook an engagement process to understand how the City can best support existing youth climate leadership and broader youth climate engagement and action.

Over a 12-month intensive period, the team facilitated and documented hundreds of hours of community engagement activities with over 800 youth 10-25 years old and community members, generating more than a thousand pages of feedback. Engagement methods included months-long youth cohorts, one-on-one conversations, immersive experiences, roundtables, interviews, and surveys. Engagement activities were designed to center different communities and neighborhoods, including, for example events focused in Little Jamaica and Scarborough; programming tailored towards Chinese and Chinese Canadian youth, Black and Indigenous high schoolers, 13-18 year-olds in the TDSB, primary students and their caregivers, Black and racialized youth from Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, and folks with disabilities; and engagements carried out with community partners like Let’s Hike T.O., Malvern Family Resource Centre, and Lakeshore Arts.

Through this intensive process, the team identified 11 key themes for Toronto youth, including the key context necessary for any institutional engagement of youth on climate, the most important policy priorities, and the guiding principles for how youth want policies to be implemented and how they want to be engaged by the City going forward. We heard from youth that the process of engagement and implementation is just as important as any policy outcome. Based on the 11 themes, the team drafted 10 recommendations for the City’s youth climate engagement. The Youth Climate Action Engagement Strategy was published in early 2025.

Further information is also available on the City of Toronto Youth Climate Action Engagement Strategy website.

This project is co-led by Dr. Laura Tozer and Dr. Grace Nosek and is funded by the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto through the Climate Positive Energy Initiative.