Youths tell trial of climate change toll, from anxiety to flood and heat impacts

By Brieanna Charlebois Sadie Vipond says she was just seven years old when she began noticing the impacts of climate change. Now a 20-year-old plaintiff in Canada’s first youth-led climate trial, Vipond described experiencing catastrophic floods in Calgary in 2013, that the city says resulted in mass evacuations, one death and $6 billion in financial losses. “I was beginning to see different actions in my community around the climate crisis, and so I was also feeling very anxious about my future,” she told the Federal Court in Vancouver. Vipond is one of 15 plaintiffs who are arguing that federal legislation violates their constitutional rights by continuing the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. The trial that began Monday heard in an opening statement from the youths’ lawyer, Catherine Boies Parker, that…

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