Earth Day Is Every Day Virtual Panel

Will Charouhis is an 18-year-old environmentalist from Florida. He serves as the North American co-leader for the World Ocean Council, a national leader for the Jane Goodall Institute, and the FXB Climate Champion, and the youth delegate for National Wildlife Federation and America is All In, He also serves as the youngest voice on the organizing Coalition for the Right to a Healthy Environment; the Coalition is this year’s recipient of the UN Human Rights Prize. Will is the founder of Forces of Nature, leading the youngest organization accredited by UNFCCC and UNEP in his aim to halt climate change, and has spoken on the strength of youth and the power of hope at United Nations conferences in Madrid, Glasgow, Stockholm, Bonn, Lisbon, New York, and Dubai. 

An author on the climate crisis, Will has submitted testimony to America’s White House Environmental Justice Council, and was published for his work in having Miami declare a climate emergency. 

While Will is relentless in his verbal and written advocacy, his focus is on hands-on action. He has spearheaded disaster relief to 3000 families in Honduras and the Bahamas, countries Will says “are least responsible for carbon emissions but most affected by climate change.” In his own community, Will serves as a Director of South Florida’s Youth Climate Leadership Board, working alongside 14 youth leaders to provide climate education to 2800 students. Will also serves as the youngest member of his Mayor’s Climate Resilience Engagement Board, and was recently invited by Miami-Dade’s Mayor to address 900 business and government leaders as the closing speaker at the Southeast Regional Climate Summit.

Having experienced climate change firsthand, Will remains acutely aware that the climate crisis is not going to wait for his generation to grow up. A firm believer that “innovation, scale, and the human spirit can provide the solutions,” Will is pioneering funded research on the artificial selection of mangroves to withstand ocean acidification and warming at the A Million Mangroves Lab. To date, he has led efforts to restore more than 6 acres of mangroves along the Florida Coast, and distributed over 1000 plants. Scaling up his A Million Mangroves initiative globally, on invitation of the US State Department Will has already drawn in partners in Gabon and Cameroon, sharing his mangrove research in the hopes of increasing restoration efforts in other coastal communities around the world. Through videos produced by Inspiring Young Heros and Earth Island Institute, Will invites everyone to join him in this battle.

Will can be reached at: 

volunteer@weareforcesofnature.org

@WCharouhis 

LinkedIn

Sarah Lin is currently a rising senior at Southwestern Academy, a high school in San Marino, California. She is the Interact Club president at her school, and she is dedicated to community service and meaningful engagement within her community. She regularly organizes food drives, street clean-ups, clothing donations, and more. She also has a passion for gardening and has been working to improve the social and physical health of her neighborhood by promoting organic, fresh produce. When plants were wilting because of unbearably hot summers, she did extensive research to help local farmers. She grew ozone beans, a special, sensitive type of bean that can be used to detect ozone levels by observing its leaf behavior. Having distributed the plants at several farmers markets, she enabled farmers in her community to keep track of their plants without having to purchase expensive equipment. She hopes to continue inspiring people to do community service and to care about sustainability.

Eighteen-year-old Chase Hartman co-founded a non-profit called Eco Brothers and an award-winning book distribution project called “read.repeat.” and has been focused on improving literacy rates and helping the environment for the past seven years. He’s collected and distributed more than 225,000 books and impacted the lives of more than 45,000 students in Hillsborough County, Florida. Chase champions the need for more books-with-diversity and dual language books in local Title-1 schools and has worked to raise more than $120,000 to support this cause and various environmental projects including monthly beach cleanups and planting and maintaining a butterfly garden at his local elementary school.

Chase is an Eagle Scout and Student Body President at Sickles High School in Tampa, Florida. He is a Be More Fund Winner, a NSHSS 18 Under 18 recipient and is a 2024 Coke Scholar.  He will be attending the University of Florida Honors College as a Business and Political Science dual-major in the Fall as a Lombardi Scholar as part of the prestigious Lombardi and Stamps Scholars Program.