Students participating in the Youth Climate Action Summit at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in 2024. Students from schools around the Pittsburgh area will meet this weekend to work on climate change. The Pittsburgh Youth for Climate Action Summit takes place this Saturday. The one-day event is guided by Communitopia , a nonprofit that provides climate change education. Teens come together to learn about climate solutions from one another, speakers and environmental groups. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with 17-year-old Mathilda Turich, a senior in the Pittsburgh Public School District, and one of the summit organizers. WESA Inbox Edition Newsletter Care about the environment? Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll send you Pittsburgh’s top news, every weekday morning. Kara Holsopple: How did you get involved in climate activism? Or maybe why? Mathilda Turich: My grandmother lives on a farm. She used to live on a farm down in North Carolina, and now she lives on the farm closer to Pittsburgh. I’ve always been very close to nature, because she’s been in that very natural space. I got to see a lot of animals very young, a lot of plants. And I also got to see how industry sort of started to take over the farm space and how invasive plants became more pervasive. She used to live in Charlotte, and they started building suburban homes really close to her farmland, and the creek got super muddy because of all the runoff from the construction. Seeing those negative effects made me more interested in conservation, and I actually first got into climate action through the summit. I went a couple of years ago, and now for the past couple of years, I’ve helped organize the summit. What have you learned from organizing these climate summits? I’ve learned […]